Lament post: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/9/764340/-Oh,-my-President.-What-are-you-doing
Response post: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/10/764413/-Obama-is-President-not-the-Champion-of-Progressives
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Here's an excerpt:
I'd like you to remember, think back to the early days of the primary, and the numerous polls and interviews with AA's who were fearful of voting for Barack Obama because they thought if he was selected he would become a target for the simmering boiling racism that is not far below the surface, ever, for us, right here in our home. I stress "our home" since African-Americans are as much a part of the foundation stones and building blocks of the US as any group, and actually more so than many who arrived in later waves.
We have been watching for generations. Like Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" we are ofttimes like anthropologists; participating and observing at the same time. Always wary. Sleep with one eye open. Prayers waft upwards in the hope that there is somebody up there listening from black churches cross America. "Please keep that young man safe" "God, protect him". Can't tell you how many times I've heard this repeated. Sadly, we know that God don't seem to protect those we cherish, or put into leadership. Can't tell you how many shrines I've seen in black homes. MLK, JFK and Bobby...Malcolm and others...we know, and feel powerless.
Here's the link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/5/762110/-We-knew,-and-we-are-watching.-Sadly.
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Here's the source essay for the Freeper post. It's more insane still: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12999
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It seems to me that one of the main problems with healthcare is the whole notion that it is legitimate to profit off of the sickness of others. This philosophical question gets occasionally raised, and then only obliquely by Democrats, but I don't recall ever having seen it argued directly, forcefully, and consistently. I think that was the whole point behind the presidential debate question of whether healthcare is a privilege or a human right.
If healthcare is merely a privilege, then profit making is not only legitimate but, indeed, should be the prime motivating force behind the design and operation of our healthcare system/industry. Just as profit is the prime motivating force behind all other successful commercial industries. That is, if you believe Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand' theory. But, if on the other hand, healthcare is a human right, is there any legitimate place for the usual profit making motivations?
In exploring this philosophical question we require a basic qualitative definition of profit. By profit, I mean those earnings above the cost of providing healthcare services and products. All costs of operating, including doctor and staff pay, and including certain non-operating costs such as reinvestment are not profit, they are costs. Profit is excess earnings paid to investors after all those other costs have been paid. Obviously, this definition can be gamed to include huge pay packages to executives, as was done by Health South, and which fall, none the less, under the definition of a legitimate operating cost. The only means which I can immediately think of to control that sort of abuse is either by regulation of executive compensation or by greatly increasing market competition - increasing market competition, though, can be highly problematic in healthcare. I think we should move the healthcare industry toward some low or non-profit model justified by the notion that healthcare is a human right. Let's begin with the low hanging fruit, the health insurance companies.
I think that private health insurance companies either shouldn't exist at all, leaving the government to insure everyone as a non-profit entity, or, they should be strongly regulated by some model of 'cost plus'. 'Cost plus' isn't the same as a pure non-profit model. It means that they can charge premiums high enough only to cover their legitimate operating costs plus some modest fixed profit margin. This was/is the model used to regulate many utility companies and for much of the same philosophical reasons I'm suggesting are true for the healthcare industry.
Attempts to remove as much (or all) of the profit motivation as is practical from the healthcare industry would predictably meet stiff opposition from conservatives, both Republican and Democratic, in congress. Yet, we as a nation have done something similar in principle, if not scope, before by the regulation of utility companies. I realize that this a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because water and electric utilities usually owned monopolies within their local markets. AT&T owned a national monopoly on telephone service until 1984. AT&T was considered a utility and operated on a 'cost plus' basis, however, they didn't face any real competition. However, even with those specific differences, I think there are enough similarities to justify such an approach for our healthcare system. At the very least, what was done in the utility industry provides historical proof that some model which is not designed to maximize profit isn't somehow Marxist or un-American.
One of the problems with a pure non-profit models is the real issue of how to attract capital for financing innovation and capacity expansion. It may be possible to create a special low-risk government bond, maybe, a health T-bill. Or, maybe, bonds would be issued directly by the healthcare companies, but guaranteed against default by the government, just like the FDIC does for savings accounts, in order to attract needed capital investment. I would not argue that this approach would be perfect or even the best approach. It leaves out equity market participation - however, I suspect that may be a net positive. I would argue that the criteria for evaluating any proposed new healthcare system should be whether it would be dramatically more efficient and effective, in terms of patient servicing, not in profit making, than is our current system.
Our current healthcare system appears to operate without much local competition, especially for hospitals and doctors. That seems a practical market reality based on limited supply in many markets. Add to that quasi-monopoly market environment a customer base which very often is desperate to be serviced and typically in no position to negotiate price and we get a market formula which results in very high pricing. Utilities had/have cost control regulation to prevent just such an unfair market pricing environment.
Pharmaceutical and medical device suppliers seem to ride the gravy train inherent to any market where a third party pays for their products. One only need reference the automobile collision and bodywork market to see an example of insurance company involvement, IMO, resulting in outrageously high service pricing. No one would have auto bodywork performed if the payment was wholly out of pocket. The auto collision industry would be forced to drastically lower their prices. I'm not, for a second, suggesting that medical insurance is not required. The point of my post is that healthcare is a right, and therefore, must be both affordable and accessible.
The cost of health insurance must be made to come down without depending only on free-market forces. The cost of most other healthcare participants, such as doctors, hospitals, drug, and medical device suppliers can be made to come down via increased competition and increased buyer power. Two forces which those participants likely wouldn't want to see strengthened. Personally, I'm a skeptic regarding the savings which will be realized via health IT, or convincing Americans to improve their health habits.
P.S.
I've neglected to explicitly state why I believe that healthcare should be a right. I believe this becuase I feel that it's immoral to incidentally profit (in the coporate sense that I defined above) from the suffering of others. This is a notion which I also believe applies to the defense industry. The idea of removing profit motivation from the defense industry was advocated by Gen. Smedley Butler as a solution to unecessary war (by which, he meant, nearly all wars) in his famous, "War is a Racket" written way back in 1935.
Link: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
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The above is an excerpt from a post by blogger Jesse Taylor over at Pandagon.net. Follow the link to read his entire post.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/i_kicked_you_in_the_nuts_because_of_bernie_sanders/
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http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Political%20Tiger/72
]]>I recommend viewing the newest of the two film first, the "Addendum", released on 10-08-2008. It addresses many of the immediate concerns - lack of trust in our institutions, green energy, the banking system, the failure of our politics, etc. - which have very recently been blogged about here at TPM. This film describes the possibiity of creating a rather utopian (I don't mean that as a prejoritive) future for humanity. The other film, the original, deals more with what could fairly be described as conspiracy theories (again, not meant as a prejoritive), but I still found it well presented and worth watching.
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I've posted my thoughts on this Cheney/neocon framing before:
and
If bloggers in their computer dens can see the problem in that framing why the hell can't the Democrats who debate Republicans on TV?
]]>I believe that the Bush/Cheney administration used torture not a last resort in some specific existential national emergency, but as a policy for conducting intelligence fishing expeditions. Torture, I have no doubt, more often elicited confessions of guilt from the innocent than it obtained useful information from the guilty. Cheney and the neocons say that it is not only proper to use torture, but is patriotic, and simply because torture makes the victim talk. It works. Torture could ONLY be wrong, by their logic, if it were not effective. If the ends are the protection of American lives, and if the ends justify the means, then most any means become justified.
If we were, however, to buy in to Cheney's and the neocon argument, that the efficacy of torture alone is the determinant of its just-ness, then why stop at only torturing the victim? Why not rape and torture his wife in front of him, if we believe it might provide us with useful information? How about torturing that suspect's child or his baby in front of him? If it makes him talk, if it "works", then, according to Cheney's logic, it must be justified. I heard David Shuster mention in passing, while he was subbing for Chris Matthews on Hardball yesterday, that if one agrees with Cheney, that torture is moral simply because it's effective, then doesn't it become immoral to NOT torture? Then, shouldn't our soldiers regularly torture everyone they encounter in
Liberals need to drill conservative proponents of torture on those sorts of questions, instead of starting from that now hackneyed, Jack Bauer, loose nuke worst case scenario. The real question is whether Americans of 2009 want their government to behave as if it were Hitler's Nazi Germany of 1940? Cheney and the Neocons have gone 'all in" on this torture question. Liberals must clearly expose the insanity of neocon philosophy, and should have neocons running for cover instead of watching them brag about how their barbarisms have saved the country.
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I had not read Sara Robinson before and was impressed with her analysis of the building right-wing extremism in this country. Anyone who has kept tabs on the Freepers knows that the behavioral observations she makes are completely acccurate, including some Freepers making allusions to domestic terrorism as being a patriotic act - yet they have the insanity to call Obama a traitor. Anyhow, here are the opening paragrahs of her essay:
Sometime back in February, about three weeks into Barack Obama's administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives.
The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.
None of this came as a surprise to veteran right-wing watchers -- we'd been predicting a bad backlash since the 2006 election -- but more than three months into the new administration, it's increasingly hard to ignore the fact that this ominous new trend is taking on a momentum of its own.
On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security ratified some of those observations. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America's loss of world standing, they said, the militant right wing is indeed rising again.
Its numbers are up, its talk is turning ugly, and it's not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-1990s.
Click below to read the rest of the essay:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/139825
A disconcerting, but very worthwhile read, IMO.
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Add to that insanity, scattered hinting of pending violent action if their demands for a "constitutional" succession from the
Check it out: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2235166/posts
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Once we can agree on what is torture we can move the debate forward to whether it is ever moral to use torture, and if so, under what circumstances? It seems to me, that the Cheney/GOP moral position on torture boils down to; "the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few". Republicans ask; what patriotic American wouldn't trade the physical pain of some terrorist to save the lives of Americans? The extreme example trotted out is one where we are holding someone we are SURE is a terrorist and who has just hidden a nuke in NYC. The clock is ticking, and so, government officials acting out the ultimate duty of a patriot, torture that KNOWN terrorist to save the city. Actually, I might do the same myself if such a pure and dire scenario were clearly the situation, I don't truly know. However, I see no need ever for a torture POLICY. All that I can see which might ever be needed is for the President to personally and clearly issue a written executive order for some very specific individual circumstance only in a national emergency. Such an order should be fully on record and, soon after, unclassified so that the American people and history can judge the circumstances involved.
I strongly suspect that records will show, however, that the Bush/Cheney administration used torture as a policy mostly to conduct intelligence fishing expeditions. I believe that they used torture to get whomever they happened to have picked up to admit they were guilty of something, anything, whether they were or not. Furthermore, I believe that was done simply because we had the power to it, and because absolutely no value was placed on the humanity of the victims. Torture, I have no doubt, more often elicited confessions of guilt from the innocent than it obtained life and death information from the guilty. That was no different than how torture was used at the
The second problem I have with a policy of torture is the increasingly dark street it leads down. If, by torturing one person, we would save the lives of many persons, then maybe, torture is, in fact, morally justifiable. Maybe, the ends do justify the means. That certainly is the essence of the argument Dick-moral compass-Cheney is making. If, however, we were to agree with Cheney, that the ends do justify the means and that the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few, then why stop at only torturing some (presumed) terrorist? Why not torture his wife as well, if we believe it will "save American lives"? Would Cheney no longer agree that saving many American lives is worth the pain of some (presumed) terrorist's wife? If not, why not? Maybe, torturing the terrorist's children would make him tell us what we want to hear even faster, thereby, saving even more American lives. Could Cheney then credibly argue that thousands of American lives wouldn't be worth it? It's just the child of terrorist scum after all. If the ends justify the means then any means are justified. Right, Mr. Cheney?
At the end of this debate, and has been pointed out by others, this really isn't about our enemies and their values, it's about us and our values. Republicans like to talk about our American history of courageous revolutionary patriots, and frontiers men and women, and about our national traditions and heritage. What Republicans want to ignore is that such brave people didn't take the safe route. They risked greatly to found and build the kind of nation they wanted to live in. Patrick Henry didn't say; give me liberty, but only if I don't have to risk death. What would those founding Americans think of today's cowardly Republicans? Probably the same as they thought about them back then, as the conservatives of their day were arguing that we should remain an English colony, and that was mostly because they were making good money off the Crown. It seems some things never change.
]]>One of Marx's fundamental critiques of capitalism, which seems logically irrefutable, is simply that workers cannot consume the value of their own production using only their wages. This is a flaw that is only apparent when considering aggregate production versus aggregate consumption, not in any isolated case of someone buying a loaf of bread with cash. In aggregate, workers cannot consume what they produce using only the wages of that production. The truth of that should be obvious, as workers are paid less in wages than the selling price of whatever it is they produced.
Credit (consumer debt) is the only means of making up that difference, hence our exponentially increasing consumer debt load. Of course, the missing value didn't dissappear, it went to the capaitlists owners of the production who do not (and as a pratical matter, cannot) consume all the excess production that workers are unable to. If they could and did, this key flaw in capitalism wouldn't exist.
Does the fact that future wages can never purchase future consumption (as Marx pointed out) make capitalism some giant Ponzi/Pyramid scam? A scam based on the expectation that future earnings will forever finance current consumption? Sooner or later (looks like sooner!) wouldn't the ever growing debt load become so large that the illusion of future earnings ever catching-up be broken, the credit supply choked-off and with it, consumption? Sound familiar?
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Republican rank and file have, do, and will view any attempt at bipartisanship - whether originating from our side or theirs - with contempt and as a sign of weakness. Republicans may feign cooperation when out of power because that is the best way to have their agenda represented, but, once back in power, is there any doubt that reciprocity does not await the Democrats? The Republican party has become a party greatly comprised of zealots, and zealots hold beliefs not opinions. Opinoins can be changed, beliefs rarely so. Let's not fool ourselves in to thinking that the Republican base can be persuaded through rational argument and discourse, they cannot. Why? Simply because rational argument was never employed in the creation of their beliefs.
tmpgary, in his related post, argues an interesting point, that civility in tone precedes civility in behavior and, ultimately, cooperation. No doubt, that is true regarding rational human argument and discourse, but that's not what we have from the Republicans. Didn't the tone of the McCain campaign and the Republican party self-escalate about a month ago? Didn't the McCain campaign brazenly announced they were unilaterally changing the tone of their campaign to one that was is wholly negative? This change in tone was not a response to any coarsening in the Obama campaign's tone or in the tone of the Democratic party. This change in tone was for the purpose of cynically mobilizing the GOP troops. Again, for Republicans, politics is war and in war you demonize your opponent so that you can feel morally justified in destroying him. Any change in our tone, for better or for worse, will have NO EFFECT on their thinking or behavior. NONE.
How, then, can Obama lead the country? The same way he is winning this election, by demonstrating to liberals and moderates alike that we share certain common values. Values which Republicans have ususally been good at obscuring. Obama's prudent and pragmatic brand of liberalism is the way of the future, I think. Many seem to misunderstand how he intends to govern. Obama has always talked about the importance of having a governing majority in the Congress, so, he is not planning to bipartisan concessions to the conservative agenda. I expect Obama to effectively lead our divided nation by enacting our common American liberal values via a liberal pragmatic solution approach. Such solutions would address conservative concerns without adopting conservative solutions.
For example, Obama talks about reducing abortions by reducing unwanted pregnancies. The conservative solution would be to target the abortions directly. The liberal pragamtic solution would address the causes of unwanted pregnancy, not the affect. In another example, this approach can also be applied to the problem of crime. Insufficent early childhood education and lack of adult economic opportunity (among the causes), instead of the societal costs of crime and of new prison construction. The end result would be a reduction in crime achieved by a liberal pragmatic solution.
Obama's liberal pragmatic solutions seek common ground with moderates without betraying core liberal values. That's how, I think, Obama plans to lead a a nation divided without violating core liberal principles. Republican hearts and minds may not follow but that isn't a necessary component of a successful Obama administration.
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