Democrats

It's Congress: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands After Hearings

dlindorff — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:06:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible
volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an
awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and
stifling laughs. A few of us couldn’t contain ourselves and actually
burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We
couldn’t resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a
prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy
lumber out. Instead, a shrivled little old man left the booth, nodded
silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to
produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max
Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of
allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six—three
conservative Democrats and three Republicans—and several weeks more of
discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that
essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather
smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed
buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health
insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

If the stench of corruption from the legal bribes of the insurance
industry lobby were not so vile and pervasive, we would all be rolling
in the aisles at the tiny fart produced by all that straining and
pushing on the part of Sen. Baucus (D-Montana) and his Finance Committee
colleagues.

Of course, it’s not over yet. Once both houses of Congress have
voted to approve the bills that have emerged from committee in House
and Senate, there will be another session on the pot—this time in a
secret conference committee, where members of the leadership of both
houses will negotiate to come up with a single bill to send back to
their respective houses for an up-or-down vote.

It can be safely predicted that the final legislation will resemble
much more the Senate version than the House version, because Senate
Democrats long ago surrendered control of that body to the minority
Republicans by accepting the so-called Rule of 60, whereby any
Republican can simply threaten to filibuster a piece of legislation and
the Democrats will immediately take it back and hack off any offending
piece of it to ensure that either all Democrats will vote for it, or
that one or two allegedly sane Republicans will join the majority of
Democrats, thus making a filibuster impossible.

Not once since at least 2006, when Democrats took over the Senate,
has the Senate Democratic leadership demanded that all Democrats in
that body support a bill or face retaliation, in the form of lost
committee assignments or sabotage of a bill important to local
constituents—the kind of thing that Republicans have done with their
members for years.

Indeed, Democrats seem to like the imaginary Rule of 60, as it
gives them a ready excuse to never have to actually do anything
progressive, as demanded by their electoral base.

And so, whether it’s health care reform, financial industry
regulation and reform, climate change legislation, civil liberties,
investigations into torture and war crimes, or ending the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, Congress has come to resemble a French railway station
lavatory, with committees grunting away in the stalls behind closed
doors, while a little old lady in the corner collects change from the
visitors who regularly come in to take a piss and monitor the
proceedings.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Best Health 'Reform' Money Can Buy

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:29:29 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When the White House or Democrats in Congress talk about health
care reform, and about wanting to preserve the central role of the
private insurance industry in health care, it pays to look at just what
it is that they they’re so anxious to preserve.

According to the Health and Human Service’s department’s National
Health Expenditures report, private insurers will pay out $854 billion
in medical claims for health insurance policyholders this year. That
represents about one-third of the nation’s estimated $2.5-trillion
medical care bill for this year. But that’s not the whole story. The
premiums paid for those claims payments will total $1.2 trillion, which
includes $179 billion in “administrative” costs (21% or over $1 out of
every $5 dollars spent on health care) and another 150 billion in
profits (a tidy 15% return). That is money that was paid out in
premiums by individuals and by employers (who every year are shifting
more of the cost of health coverage onto employees).

A big part of that $179 billion you and your employer pay for
insurance company “administrative expenses” goes to fund private “death
panels” whose job, as insurance company whistleblower Wendell Potter
has testified in Congress, to deny coverage to sick policyholders.

And that $179 billion wasted on administration (Medicare, a
federally-run program, only devotes 4% of costs to administration by
way of comparison), isn’t all. Doctors, hospitals and pharmacies also
spend a similar sum on administrative expenses, much of it devoted to
fighting to get paid by those same insurance companies. How many of us
have spent hours struggling over claims forms, and getting signatures
from physicians in order to get reimbursed for care, or on the phone
arguing with insurance company “customer service” people on the phone?
Doctors, hospital administrators and pharmacists do the same thing.
That’s why your doctor’s office has such a large staff of people who
aren’t there to take your pulse or blood pressure—just to work with
paper.

Insurance companies, in their discussions with investment analysts,
actually refer to their payouts for patient care vs. their premium take
as their “medical loss ratio,” a figure which they vow to improve by
clamping down on “losses” (meaning benefits paid).

I took a look at the latest 10-Q financial statement filed by
Aetna, one of the nation’s largest private health insurers. Through
June 30, Aetna took in $14 billion in premiums, $10.7 billion of that
amount from employers and employees, $2.9 billion more from Medicare
recipients who bought a supplemental insurance plan to cover the gap in
what Medicare covers, and another $400 million for handling Medicaid
claims. Aetna reports that it paid out $11.9 billion in health care
reimbursements, and $2.3 billion in administrative expenses (20%).

By the way, this same Aetna is headed by CEO Ronald A. Williams,
who earned 24.3 million in 2008 according to Forbes magazine (about the
norm for insurance CEOs), as well as another $296,639 as a board member
of American Express. Williams also has unexercised options on Aetna
stock worth $194.5 million, according to Forbes. He owns a palatial
home in Farmington, CT assessed at $1.7 million. According to
Opensecrets.org, Williams has spent close to $10 million on lobbying
activity for his company and the insurance industry since 2005.

Somebody tell me why this is a system we not only want to keep, but
that, under proposals working their way through House and Senate, would
force another 40-50 million currently uninsured people, most of them
low-income, to pay into under threat of being assessed a $3800 tax
penalty by the IRS.

Common sense says that if this insurance intermediary were removed
from the process, besides Williams and the other industry CEOs and
other executives losing their fat paychecks and bloated homes, planes
and portfolios, the whole American healthcare system would run a lot
more smoothly and cheaply.

I remember back in 1990, when I was working on my book Marketplace Medicine
(Bantam 1992) about the for-profit hospital industry, talking to the
administrator of a Canadian hospital in Ontario. He told me he had
formerly worked as a hospital administrator in the US. He reported that
back then, when new less-invasive technologies, as well as reforms
introduced to Medicare, had begun reducing the amount of time people
were spending in hospital beds, his hospital had been able to shut an
entire wing because of a declining patient census. “But one year later,
we had to reopen it to accommodate all the staff needed to deal with
paperwork from the insurance industry,” he said. That problem has only
gotten worse over the ensuing two decades. Meanwhile, this same
administrator told me, “In Canada, I have only three people doing
paperwork for the whole hospital: one for Canadians, and two to deal
with paperwork for the occasional American tourist who gets sick or
injured.”

Let’s be clear. The only reason Congress and the White House are
pushing a plan that relies on the private insurance industry is that
the private insurance industry is flooding the capital with money. It’s
a great investment for them. If health insurers are collectively
earning $150 billion in profits in a year, and it only costs them
perhaps $50 million in legal bribes to keep their scam operating,
they’re earning a 3000% return on investment!
We would all be far
better off if Congress just passed Rep. John Conyers’ bill, HR 676, to
expand Medicare to cover everyone. As I have explained in an earlier article,
expanding Medicare would result in no net increase in taxes, and
because it would eliminate insurance premiums, workers’ comp and public
employee health expenses while also lowering car insurance rates, not
to mention lowering the prices charged by doctors, hospitals and
pharmaceutical companies, also a substantial savings for all Americans.

Some people worry that if we were all on Medicare, medical research
would suffer. But this is a spurious fear. Much of the most important
research in medical care and treatment is funded by the federal
government through the National Institutes of Health. In fact,
arguably, the profit motive leads industry to focus research on highly
profitable, but much less urgent things, so we get research on cosmetic
uses for Botox, but little or no research on finding a cure for Malaria
or drug-resistant TB.

There may be a valid argument for competitive markets, say for cars
or food production and distribution. But it should be abundantly clear
by this point that when it comes to health care, the market doesn’t
work. In fact, it is perverse. The end user—your and me—will never have
the information needed to make a wise decision regarding either cost or
quality. Furthermore, unless we were all buying our own insurance and
selecting our own doctors unimpeded by “preferred provider” or HMO
lists, we are being forced to chose, if we get any choice at all, from
a limited selection made available by our employers, who are motivated
only by bottom-line concerns. In fact, in countries like Canada or
France, which have Medicare-like single-payer systems, people have
vastly more choice as to physician and hospital than any American
patient.

Some people also worry that a government-run single-payer insurance
system, by pushing down the reimbursements to doctors and hospitals
through its monopoly position as sole paymaster, would lead to a
defunding of hospitals and would drive away the “best” students from
choosing the medical profession. But really, if you look at what
hospitals in the current “competitive” market spend much of their money
on, it turns out to be cosmetic things like fancy building exteriors,
pretty rooms, etc.—things that help lure patients, but that do nothing
to improve patient care. As for future doctors, does anyone really
think that having people go into medicine because of the prospect of
earning millions of dollars and driving fancy sports cars results in
better doctors than having people choose a medical career because of a
passion to serve humanity, or a passion for research into curing
disease? What changes is not the quality of the medical students, but
their motivation.

All the sturm and drang in Washington and in the media over the
course of health care “reform” in Washington is really much ado about
nothing. We are not getting real reform.

In a replay of last year’s to-do over mess in the banking industry,
we are watching our dysfunctional and corrupt government simply, to
quote President Obama, “kick the can” down the road, leaving the next
Congress and the next President to deal with the same disaster.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans will continue to die
needlessly every year because the care they need will be denied to them
by insurance companies that are focused on making as much money as
possible, and by a government that has sold its soul to the lobbyists.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992) and more recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Health Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:54:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC
drama “West Wing,” in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat
played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable
Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The Smits character says
his “ideal plan” would be Medicare for all. “That’s crazy” counters the
Alda Republican. Then Seelye sequed to an opinion piece recently penned
by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
(a noble figure who nonetheless has long-since been type-cast as an
out-of-touch extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare
into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several
economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the
idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone
who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

As her representative liberal, she quoted Brandeis economist Stuart
Altman, an Obama adviser during the presidential campaign, who said
that while he is not “ideologically uncomfortable” with expanding
Medicare, such a move would be “disruptive.” Going then to what she
described as “the other end of the political spectrum,” Seeley quoted
Robert E Moffit, of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who claimed
Medicare would mean too much government power over heatlh care.”
Finally, seeking what she could call middle ground, Seelye turned to
Dartmouth economist Jonathan Skinner, who claimed that expanding
Medicare would be good because it would cover everyone, but bad because
it would mean tripling the Medicare tax, currently 2.9% of paychecks.
If we were looking at a political yardstick here, Seelye started at the
16” mark (Altman), then went to the 36” mark (Moffit), and finally went
to the 24” mark (Skinner).

But where was an economist from the real left end of the political
spectrum, over in the single digits of that yardstick? Altaman,
representing the private insurance-based Obama approach, was hardly it!

Seelye might have gone to her colleague, columnist Paul Krugman, a
Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, who has on a number of
occasions written and stated that a single-payer system such as
Medicare for all would be “far cheaper” than any private
insurance-based system. Krugman, at least, would be over by the 10” or
12” line on a political yardstick.

Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and
benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House
Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), which would expand Medicare to
cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but says
innocently that it is “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill,
despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been
blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and
the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is
dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

The reason the Times and the insurance industry-besotted
White House and Congressional leadership don’t want that analysis is
that it would show clearly that a single-payer system would mean vast
savings for all Americans.

Seelye quotes economist Skinner as claiming that Medicare expansion
to cover every American would mean a tripling of the Medicare payroll
tax—currently set at 2.9% of wages. But even if we accepted Skinner’s
math, it is meaningless without looking at the savings side.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but what about the following:

Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and
is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400
billion a year.

Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.

Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal,
state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called
“charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t
qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.

Individuals and employers would no longer have to pay for private insurance.

Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.

Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.

Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings
would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8%.

The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all,
devote 10% of GDP to health care. Americans, who have
private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17%
of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

2009 DEMMY Awards

Bob Fertik — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:14:07 -0400

In honor of Sunday's EMMY Awards, I'd like to give out DEMMY Awards to the best Democrats on TV.

Below are three categories: Pundits, Elected Officials, and Frauds.

We'll open the voting this weekend on Democrats.com, but I'd like to complete the nominations first. So which "TV Democrats" did I leave out?

Pundits

Female

Male

Joy Behar
Donna Brazile
Eleanor Clift
Gail Collins
Ana Marie Cox
Maureen Dowd
Susan Estrich
Daphne Eviatar
Geraldine Ferraro
Karen Finney
Laura Flanders
Janeane Garofalo
Whoopi Goldberg
Amy Goodman
Jane Hamsher
Melissa Harris-Lacewell
Liz Holtzman
Arianna Huffington
Mimi Kennedy
Naomi Klein
Dahlia Lithwick
Rachel Maddow
Stephanie Miller
Shannyn Moore
Dee Dee Myers
Ellen Ratner
Randi Rhodes
Hilary Rosen
Nancy Skinner
Amanda Terkel
Helen Thomas
Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Joan Walsh
Lizz Winstead
Naomi Wolf

Spencer Ackerman
Jonathan Alter
John Amato
John Aravosis
Bob Beckel
Paul Begala
Max Blumenthal
Sid Blumenthal
Bob Borosage
David Brock
Willie Brown
Tim Carpenter
James Carville
Steve Clemons
Stephen Colbert
Juan Cole
Alan Colmes
Joe Conason
Steven Colbert
David Corn
Mario Cuomo
Howard Dean
E.J. Dionne
Phil Donahue
Mike Dukakis
Michael Eric Dyson
Mike Farrell
Jeffrey Feldman
Leo Gerard
Juan Gonzalez
Al Gore
Mark Green
Glenn Greenwald
Robert Greenwald
Ryan Grim
Thom Hartmann
Chris Hayes
Ellis Henican
Bob Herbert
Hendrick Hertzberg
Jim Hightower
Jesse Jackson Sr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Chris Kofinis
Paul Krugman
Robert Kuttner
David Letterman
Mike Lux
Bill Maher
Roland Martin
Terry McAuliffe
Steve McMahon
Ari Melber
Jim Moore
Michael Moore
Markos Moulitsas
Bill Moyers
David Neiwert
John Nichols
Lawrence O'Donnell
Keith Olbermann
Clarence Page
Nico Pitney
Greg Palast
Sean Penn
John Podesta
Bill Press
Robert Redford
Robert Reich
Jack Rice
Frank Rich
Eugene Robinson
Michael Rogers
Simon Rosenberg
Matthew Rothschild
Jeremy Scahill
Ed Schultz
Sam Seder
Roy Sekoff
Al Sharpton
Russell Simmons
David Sirota
Mark Shields
Bob Shrum
David Shuster
David Sirota
Wayne Slater
Eliot Spitzer
Sam Stein
Jon Stewart
David Swanson
Matt Taibbi
Joe Trippi
Cenk Uygur
Matt Yglesias
Carlos Watson

Elected Officials (currently in office, excluding President/VP)

Female	Male
Barbara Boxer Jennifer Granholm Barbara Lee Claire McCaskill Nancy Pelosi Jan Schakowsky Debbie Stabenow Maxine Waters	Sherrod Brown Jim Clyburn Chris Dodd Dick Durbin Russ Feingold Dianne Feinstein Barney Frank Tom Harkin Tim Kaine John Kerry Pat Leahy Carl Levin Dennis Kucinich Jerrold Nadler Gavin Newsom Charlie Rangel Ed Rendell Bernie Sanders Chuck Schumer Chris Van Hollen Anthony Weiner Robert Wexler Sheldon Whitehouse

And finally, a special category for frauds who aren't Democrats at all, but "play one on TV."

Frauds

Max Baucus
Evan Bayh
Lanny Davis
Harold Ford Jr.
Joe Klein
Mark Penn
Harry Reid

In Praise of 'Joe' Wilson: What's Wrong with Calling Out Lies in Congress?

dlindorff — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:55:28 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. “Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the “dignity of the presidency” by calling out “Liar!” in the middle of President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

But what’s wrong with that? Whatever the veracity of Obama’s claim that his proposed health care “reform” would not pay for the health care of illegal immigrants residing in the US (and one can only hope that statement was fatuous, because at a minimum we would certainly want the government to pay for the care of an illegal immigrant in childbirth, or of an illegal immigrant who came down with a contagious disease), and even if Rep. Wilson is a racist bozo who wrongly thinks or wants to imply that Obama's plan would be out there enrolling undocumented workers in the millions at taxpayer expense, why shouldn’t members of Congress call out a president if they think he’s lying to them from the podium?

One of the big problems with American democracy is that the presidency has over the years been elevated to the level of a monarchy, with all the imperial trappings and pomposity formerly associated with royalty. Presidents surely should get no more respect than a prime minister, and look at the hoots and catcalls PMs have to endure when they address Parliament in the UK. That’s a good thing.

Anyhow, it would have been far better if, instead of clapping wildly, liberal Democrats in Congress had hooted down some of the other whoppers and stretchers told by the president in his health care address.

Among them:

1. First and foremost, Obama’s claim that he was “determined to be the last” president to have to deal with health care reform and that he didn’t want to “kick the can” down the street for a future administration to deal with. In fact, that is just what he did with his proposal, which has left the basic untenable system of employee-financed healthcare in place, and which has left the private insurance industry in control of who gets treatment and how much they will have to pay for it. It’s a sure bet that before very long—perhaps in just four more years—another president will face the same crisis. A boisterous cat-call of “Can Kicker!” here would have been in order.

2. Obama said that “nothing else even comes close” to health care expenditures in terms of causing the federal deficit. In fact, something does---the military budget—but that topic is off limits for both Republicans and Democrats. Why couldn’t Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold have yelled out, “What about military spending!”

3. Perhaps one of the biggest lies of the night was the president’s claim that while there are “arguments to be made” for single-payer systems like Canada’s, switching to single-payer in the US would require building “an entirely new system from scratch.” The truth: Medicare is already a successful single-payer system and in fact, it is bigger and older than Canada’s own nation-wide system. Expanding it to cover every American would not be starting from scratch at all. It would be expanding something already time-tested. Where were the shouts of “What about Medicare!” from Rep. John Conyers (and his dozens of cosponsors), whose bill, HR 676, to expand Medicare to all has been barred from getting even a hearing by the House leadership with encouragement from the White House?

4. The president insisted that insurance executives don’t “cherry-pick” profitable customers and push out those who are sickest, because they are “bad people.” He said they are just doing it because it’s profitable. It would have been nice if at least someone in the assembled throng of lobbiest-enthralled House and Senate members had shouted out something like “Just like bank robbers and drug dealers!” because the truth is that health insurance executives are bad people. They know that they are killing people every day through their ruthless policies, and they go right ahead and do it. Pursuit of profit does not, or at least should not, constitute a license to kill. (Just imagine a hit man, at his sentencing hearing, telling the judge, “I’m not a bad person, Your Honor. I just knock people off because it’s profitable.”)

5. The president said he was “not trying to put the insurance industry out of business,” and added, “They provide a legitimate service.” This line, not surprisingly, given the amount of money that industry has lavished on members of Congress and on the president himself, got what was probably the loudest bi-partisan applause of the night. But it surely led to a lot of groans and of coffee, tea or beer being spewed out involuntarily across carpets and upholstery in homes across America. Legitimate service? Insurance firms are nothing but vampires, or better, leeches on the health care system. They provide no service. Ask doctors, who have to fight to get permission to treat patients, and then fight to get reimbursed. Ask patients, who spend hours on the phone arguing with faceless drones, some probably in Bangalor or Manila, who are denying them coverage for needed medicines or procedures that are supposed to be covered. Listen to the testimony of whistle-blowers who have confirmed that those drones actually get paid bonuses based upon the number of claims they manage to deny. How satisfying it would have been if someone in Congress had yelled out, “Legitimate service my ass!”

6. Turning to the pathetically circumscribed and downsized “public option” in his “reform” plan, Obama declared that “a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option.” Well that may be true, but it's not the whole truth. It would have been a great moment for Kucinich or Conyers or some other progressive member of Congress to shout out: “A majority also favors a single-payer plan!”

7. And where the defenders of women’s rights, when Obama vowed that under his plan, “no federal funds would be used to fund abortions?” Couldn’t someone have shouted out, “Women have rights too!” Is the president really saying that if a woman is raped, or a child gets pregnant through incest, or if a woman’s life is at risk because of a pregnancy, that his public plan will not pay for her to obtain an abortion? Cries of “For shame!” should have been ringing through the hall!

8. Finally the president said that one reason the nation has such record deficits is that during the prior administration, so many initiatives, “including the Iraq War,” were set in motion but “not paid for,” and he vowed, “I will not make that same mistake with health care.” But he is doing the same thing with supplemental war funding requests for his war in Afghanistan, and with the continued war and occupation in Iraq, and someone should have called him on that. Besides, there’s no way that the program he is proposing will be paid for by current funding. It will add to the deficit and he should have the courage to admit it, or to call for more taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. A lusty “Tax the rich!” cry in unison from the progressive caucus would have been appreciated by viewers.

Whack-job or not, Rep. Wilson did the cause of democracy and honest discourse a favor when, faced with a statement he felt was clearly false, he found he couldn’t repress the urge to call the president a “liar.” In doing so, he put a much-needed ding in the wholly inappropriate and dangerous imperial aura of “respect” that has grown like lichens around the office of President. No more than anyone else in this nation, a president should have to earn the respect not just of the members of Congress, but of the broader public. He or she is another citizen, no more and no less, and when a president, like President Obama in this instance, dissembles, exaggerates or attempts to deceive or mislead, it is healthy for democracy if he is called out on it immediately and publicly.

We need more honesty in Washington, not more civility.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

With Friends Like These: Wal-Mart, Health `Reform’ and Obama’s `Public Option’

dlindorff — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:09:49 -0400

By Dave LIndorff

All you need to really know about the Obama health “reform” initiative is that it is being supported by retail giant Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, a corporation that was built on the philosophy of treating
workers like dirt (the company famously locks its employees inside its
buildings at night, forces workers who have checked out of their shifts
to continue to serve customers, off the clock, if they are asked for
help on their way out of the store, has bitterly resisted offering any
health benefits, and has one of the worst records of labor law
violations of any company in the country), is now signing on as an
endorser of the Obama health reform effort, saying:

“We believe now is the time for action on this vital issue. We
commend the leadership of elected officials who are committed to
enactment of reform, and we appreciate the commitment to inclusion and
transparency which has been present thus far.

“We are entering a critical time during which all of us who will
be asked to pay for health care reform will have to make a choice on
whether to support the legislation. This choice will require employers
to consider the trade off of agreeing to a coverage mandate and
additional taxes versus the promise of reduced health care cost
increases.”

Why would a company like Wal-Mart, with its Paleolithic attitude
towards its own workers, be supporting a plan that, at least
ostensibly, claims to be trying to provide health coverage for the
working poor?

There are several answers. First of all, from a competitive point of
view, Wal-Mart probably figures that if there is an employer mandate to
provide health benefits, with a hefty fine for those that refuse to
comply, the company is in a better position to provide a minimal plan
than many of its competitors, like K-Mart or Target. Second, the
company’s executives may figure that the so-called “public option” will
offer it a cheaper alternative, subsidized by the taxpayer, than
existing private insurance plans. This is one valid point of attack
from the right on the Obama plan: that a government-run alternative to
private insurance would end up being a dumping ground for companies
that didn’t want to pay for private insurance coverage plans for their
workers.

Finally, Wal-Mart probably figures that the Obama plan is the best
way to avoid a move to a single-payer system ala Canada’s, which
inevitably would be heavily financed by corporate taxes.

There are few giant corporations in America that are worse than
Wal-Mart when it comes to employee relations and treatment of workers,
so when you see a company like that coming out in support of any
government program—particularly one that is as critically important to
the lives of ordinary working people as health care—you should
immediately question the value and the intent of that plan.

The same point can be made about the so called “savings” being
offered by various segments of the medical-industrial complex in deals
being struck with and touted by the White House (the pharmaceutical
industry has promised to cut drug costs to the government and the
public by $80 billion over 10 years, while the hospital industry has
agreed to offer savings of another $150 billion over the same period).
While these so-called savings are mostly bogus sleight-of-hands (for
example, much of the “savings” being offered by the hospital industry
consists of reduced government compensation for the treatment of the
uninsured in emergency rooms, but of course, if the Obama plan is
passed, and insurance coverage is offered to most Americans, there
would be far fewer uninsured patients in hospitals anyway), the real
reason these big industry sectors are coming on board the Obama plan is
that they see it as a way to avoid, or push off to the future, a
single-payer system that would dictate all their fees and prices.

The point is, if the very groups that have created the massively
expensive and exclusionary health care system that we have today in
America, and that for years have bitterly resisted any efforts to
seriously reform it and to make it open to all, regardless of income or
medical condition, are suddenly endorsing a plan that purports to be a
real, progressive reform, we have to question the premise: that the
reform really is real or progressive.

And the plan being promoted by President Obama and by the Democrats
in Congress is not real or progressive. It is a plan that will further
enrich the health care industry, that will not stop the continuing rise
in health care costs, that will still leave millions of people without
access to quality medical care, and that will end up costing taxpayers
more than they are already paying.

The proof is the support for this plan being offered by the likes of Wal-Mart and the big medical industry players.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
"Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains"
(Bantam Books, 1992) and most recently of "The Case for Impeachment"
(St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers: Employers Undermine Stimulus Program

dlindorff — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:21:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or
underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing
patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic
stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the
growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce,
at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and
early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this
year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of
the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending
package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were
promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully
reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media,
suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a
report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had,
for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the
hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off
workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment
benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On
inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration
officials, that unemployment figures are a “lagging indicator,” and
thus are no indication that the recession is continuing to worsen. The
problem with this sleight-of-hand is that unemployment itself, when it
is rising rapidly as it has been now for a year, is a cause of
deepening recession. When one in five workers is unemployed or
unwillingly underemployed, that represents not only a huge drop in
consumer demand for everything from basic necessities to luxuries, but
also a huge dark cloud of anxiety that hangs over most of the rest of
the public, leading everyone to cut back on their spending, thus
dragging down the economy further.

But there is another factor at work, which is not getting much
attention, and that is the negative role being played by employers,
both public and private, in worsening the recession and undermining the
stimulus effort, such as it is, by actually using economic crisis as an
excuse to further attack and undermine workers and their incomes.

Take Temple University, where I live. The university, a largely
publicly-funded institution, has received $10 million in federal
stimulus funds, largely replacing the state funding that it lost when
the state cut back on its educational budget, and though those funds
were specifically intended by Congress to be used to improve student
achievement and to put people to work quickly, Temple, which has also
seen student admissions and tuition revenues increase during the
recession, has done the opposite—laying off staff, including
departmental staff and other personnel. The university for the past
year has also been engaged in a classic union-busting campaign against
one of its staff unions, which has been working 0n an expired contract
for a year, and its faculty union, which has been working on an expired
contract since last October. The school last year hired an outside law
firm, Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, that on its website touts
its expertise in “union avoidance,” to handle the school’s “bargaining”
with faculty.

In this, Temple is hardly alone. Across the country, companies and
public institutions have been taking brutal advantage of the economic
crisis as an opportunity to attack their workers, slashing employment,
demanding pay cuts (the New York Times, for example, has cut
employee paychecks by 5%), reducing long-held benefits, and generally
contributing to the impoverishment and insecurity of the broader
American workforce. According to a recent report, 29 percent of
employers who had historically been offering their employees a match
for their own contributions to 401(k) retirement plans have eliminated
that matching money over the last year.

These cutbacks and layoffs are bad enough when made by private
firms, many of which are still quite profitable and which have
benefited over the years and recently from tax incentives aimed at boosting
employment, but they are particularly obscene when they are made by
institutions that are receiving public stimulus money, like schools,
public transit agencies, and state and local governments. Indeed, it’s
probably the case that much of the potential stimulus of the
taxpayer-funded stimulus plan has been negated by job cuts and pay cuts
being made by the state and local entities that have received the bulk
of that money. If a state, for example, uses $50 million in stimulus
funds to repair a bridge, in the process providing jobs to perhaps 100
construction workers, and then lays off 200 state workers, that
stimulus money is completely wasted in terms of boosting the economy.

So far, most of the frustration and anger over this undermining of
the economic stimulus program is coming from the unemployed. Taxpayers,
who will end up paying for this stimulus (all of which was borrowed
money) in future years, have so far not raised a fuss, perhaps because
they have not gotten the news that employers are busy undermining the
program. That could change if unemployment, as expected, keeps rising
inexorably. Maybe at that point people will start demanding that their
taxes be used by the federal government to directly employ people,
instead of trusting employers to pass it through to their workers, or
that at a minimum, organizations receiving stimulus program funds be
barred from laying workers off or cutting their pay.

______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:48:01 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American
healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what
its major failings are, and there are two of these.

The first is cost. America is one of the or possibly the most
expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The corollary of
that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing if you are
in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company, a
pharmaceutical firm or a nursing home owner.

The second is access. One in six Americans—a total of 50 million
people at latest count—have no way to pay for that care. Too young for
Medicare, too “well off” for Medicaid, but too poor to buy private
health insurance or too sick to be admitted into a plan, or employed by
a company that doesn’t provide health benefits, these people get no
medical care until they get so sick that they are brought into a
hospital emergency room where they get treated (often too late) at
public expense, or at the hospital’s expense, with the cost shifted
onto taxpayers or onto insured patients’ premiums.

Any reform of this atrocious “system” must address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.

And that’s where all the various versions of Obamacare fall flat.

Simply put, you cannot solve either of these problems by leaving
the payment system for medical care in the hands of the private
insurance industry, since the whole paradigm of insurance is to make
money by keeping high-risk people out of the insured pool, and by
keeping reimbursements and coverage for premium payers as low as
possible.

Having a so-called “public option” plan working in competition with
private insurance plans will not solve this problem. Either the public
option will become like the private options—trimming benefits and
rejecting some applicants—or it will become a dumping ground for all
the high-cost, high-risk people that the private sector insurance
industry doesn’t want. At that point, the public plan will become a
huge cost burden on the taxpayer, who will begin demanding that it cut
back in the benefits it provides, taking us right back to where we
started.

The fact that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress
are both raising the issue of the high cost of health care “reform,”
and are talking about ways to raise revenues to pay for it
tells us all we need to know about the alleged “reform” schemes they
are contemplating. They are doomed and, even if implemented, will not
work.

Real reform of the American health care system would not cost money. It would save money.

There is a level of dishonesty in what passes for the debate over
health care “reform” in both Congress and the media that is stunning in
its brazenness and/or venality.
Of course real reform would cost more in government spending. But that
is because real reform would remove the cost of medical care from both
employers and from workers (who over the last 20 years have been
shouldering an increasing share of their own medical care). And that
shift would mean more profits for US companies, which would free up
more money for wages, and it would mean less money deducted from
paychecks, meaning higher incomes for workers.

If President Obama had any political courage at all, he’d simply
get on TV and say this: I will create a plan that will cover everyone,
lift the burden of paying for healthcare from individuals and
employers, and have the government pay for it all. You the taxpayer
will pay for this plan with higher taxes, but you will no longer have
any significant medical bills, you will no longer have health insurance
premiums deducted from your paycheck, your employer will no longer be
paying for employee medical coverage, and you will never have to worry
about losing health benefits again, even if you are laid off.
(Incidentally, eliminating employer-funded health insurance would go a
long way towards allowing workers to fight to unions, and to strike for
contracts, by ending the threat that they would lose their benefits.)

Of course, to do that the president would have to be talking about
what is variously known as national health care or a single-payer plan,
in which the government is the insurer of health care for all.

This option isn’t even being discussed in this so-called debate. As
I’ve written earlier, even though there is an excellent single-payer
system in place that has been running for a third of a century just to
the north in Canada—a system where patients have absolute freedom to
choose their doctor, get instant access to a hospital and to expert
specialist care in emergencies, and have a healthier society by every
statistical measure—all at a fraction of the staggering cost of
healthcare in the US, not one Canadian expert working in that system
has been invited down to discuss its workings with the White House or
with members of Congress.

There has been a lot of negative propaganda spread about Canada’s
single-payer system, by right wing, business-funded “no-think” tanks,
and by medical industry lobbies from the American Medical Assn. to the
pharmaceutical industry, but no government committee or agency has
bothered, or dared, to bring in Canadian experts to respond to and
debunk that propaganda. The corporate liars talk about waiting lists
and lack of access to CAT-scan or MRI machines. But all we really need
to know about the Canadian, and other similar single-payer systems, is
that nowhere that they have been instituted have they been later
terminated, even when, as in Canada, right-wing governments have been
elected to power. The public, whether in Canada, or France, or England,
or Taiwan or elsewhere, loves their public health insurance system,
whatever flaws or problems with underfunding those systems may have at
certain times. Trying ot eliminate such systems would be political
suicide for a conservative government, as even arch-free-marketer
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who never me a government
activity that she didn’t want to privatize, learned.

Right now, with half of all Americans reportedly fearing that they
could lose their jobs, and with one in five Americans reportedly either
unemployed, or involuntarily working part-time, we have a situation
where a majority of Americans either have no health insurance, have
lost their health insurance, or are in danger of losing their
employer-funded health insurance. It is a unique moment when a bold
president and Congress could act to end private health insurance and
establish a public single-payer insurance plan to insure and provide
access to affordable medical care to all Americans.

Instead of this, we are being offered half measures or no measures
at all by leaders who are shamelessly in hock to the health care
industry or who are afraid of its power.

17 years ago, the Clintons had a similar opportunity to grab the
health care industry by the neck, strangle it, and produce a
single-payer alternative. They blew that chance by trying to keep the
health care greed-heads happy. Now, almost a generation later, we have
another shot at it, and Obama and his Democratic Congress are doing the
same thing again. There is a strong likelihood that they will fail,
like the Clintons before them. If they succeed in coming up with some
kind of hybrid public-private Frankenstein of a system that includes a
public insurance option, it will simply delay the inevitable disaster,
as medical costs, already 20 percent of GDP—the highest share of any
economy in the world—continue to soar, and as the cost of the public
plan, which will inevitably become a dumping ground for high-cost
patients, becomes politically untenable. In the end, we will have even
more expensive and inaccessible healthcare than we have today.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but only if Americans rip their
eyes away from their crisp new digital-image TV screens and start
demanding real health care reform will we get honest reform. A good
place to begin would be to start writing and phoning your local media
outlets to ask why they are not reporting on single-payer, and in
particular on the single-payer bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers
(D-MI), which is being silently blocked and killed by his colleagues in
the Democratic congressional leadership and by the White House. A good
place to begin would also be to start calling your elected
representatives to demand that they support Rep. Conyers’ single-payer
bill.

___________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His is author of
the critically acclaimed book “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the
For-Profit Hospital Companies” (Bantam Books, 1992). His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work can be
found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Moran for Virginia

davidswanson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:18:20 -0400

By David Swanson

I ran into Creigh Deeds, candidate for Virginia Governor, at the farmer's market in Charlottesville on Saturday. He'd been trailing in the polls for a long time while the two men ahead of him, Brian Moran and Terry McAuliffe beat up on each other. Now Deeds is leading, but only just barely. Essentially it's a three-way tie for the Democratic nomination in the Tuesday, June 9th, primary, with virtually nobody planning to vote and the outcome entirely dependent on who gets their handful of supporters to actually go to the polls.

When I spoke to him on Saturday, Deeds clearly liked the prospect of now being ahead but also the idea of being the underdog, and he accurately said that nothing had been decided. He did not strike me as particularly progressive. He is the local boy for rural Virginia, of course, and people here want to like him. Meanwhile, Moran did not at first appeal to me because he shares a last name with his brother Jim Moran whose performance in the U.S. Congress leaves much to be desired. On the other hand, in Moran's favor, Deeds has been endorsed by the Washington Post and extensively bragged about it as if that were a good thing.

But all of these superficial prejudices ought to give way to consideration of the candidates' positions on issues, with some concern for their past actions and proven ability to get things done. McAuliffe is, of course, such a disgusting sold-out corporate stooge that few progressives will support him. The few who do, seem to base their support on the idea that he'll fight hardest against Republicans. But what policies will he fight for? I haven't seen any good answer to that question. The key question right now is how to beat McAuliffe on Tuesday. If, between Moran and Deeds, one of them were clearly better than the other, we could all get organized behind that one and work to defeat McAuliffe. Otherwise, we could end up seeing our third choice candidate win.

This dilemma could also be solved, in a way, with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). Back when Deeds was trailing, Rob Richie was arguing that both McAuliffe and Moran supporters would choose Deeds as their second choice and thus give him the victory if IRV were used. But so might supporters of Deeds favor Moran as their second choice. In primaries conducted on paper and counted locally (as in a recent Charlottesville City Council Democratic primary at a single polling place that used IRV) the integrity of an election can be protected while considering second choices and ensuring majority support for a winner. But in a state-wide race, votes could only be counted at a central location if IRV were used. If you can't ensure the results by having them counted publicly where they are cast, what good is improving the method of calculation?

There is a better way that takes into consideration the weaknesses of winner-take-all. We should figure out who the best winner would be and back that candidate. Claims about viability do not in this case even enter into it. The race is a three-way tie.

Looking at Deeds' and Moran's positions on various policies, one finds above all else overlap. I'm surprised neither one has sued the other for plagiarization. But there are differences, and they favor Moran. His positions may be full of hypocrisy and exaggeration. He's opposing things he's supported in the past. But that's true of all three of these candidates. Only Moran is saying he will oppose off-shore drilling and new coal plants and nuclear plants. Only Moran is supporting repeal of a hateful anti-gay rights amendment. Only Moran, as far as I know, is talking about the rights of the accused and the need to lock fewer people away for many years in prison. If those positions win in the primary, they will be made stronger. Deeds' positions on these issues are closer to those of the Republican he would compete against in the general election. Guns in bars may sound like fun to certain people, but should we elect someone who thinks it's a smart idea?

Moran has accepted more legal bribes (campaign contributions) and significantly more from military contractors. But Deeds has accepted military money, he just hasn't been able to accept as much of it -- no doubt because he doesn't have a brother in Congress on the Appropriations Committee.

One other consideration, beyond who's best to win the primary, is who's most likely to win the general election if nominated. But I've heard passionate declarations that only Deeds and only Moran and only McAuliffe can win the general election. It comes down to whether you buy the conventional wisdom that the best way for Democrats to win is to steal Republican votes, or you accept the alternative view that Democrats have a better chance if they inspire more people to vote and allow the Republicans to keep their voters. Given that huge numbers of Virginians registered to vote last year precisely in order to vote for Obama for president, the inspiring-more-people approach has greater potential than usual. Can first-time voters in 2008 be persuaded to vote in a general election in 2009? What about in a primary?

My recommendation is to find anyone who would vote for either Moran or Deeds (but especially Moran) and make sure they vote on Tuesday. I'd save most of the energy that could go into debating the merits of these two imperfect candidates and invest it in turning out their supporters. Volunteer here now:
http://www.brianmoran.com/volunteer