Democratic Party

Unemployment Up Dramatically! Stocks Rise! Huh?

dlindorff — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:29:34 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

But that isn’t true with a deep recession like this one, because at
some point—and we’re well past that point—high and prolonged
unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a
psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal. Once people feel that they
aren’t going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs
feel that their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things
except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72% of
economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a “lagging
indicator.” High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the
economic downturn.

If people aren’t buying stuff, then companies won’t make it, which
means that they stop hiring, and even lay more people off, and so
unemployment becomes a downward spiral of cause and effect.

But what about the stock market rise? Why would investors think that a worse-than-expected jobs report is a good thing?

There are several explanations for this ugly phenomenon. First of
all, rising unemployment—particularly sharply rising unemployment—means
that the Federal Reserve will definitely not, for the foreseeable
future, raise interest rates. A rise in interest rates would hit
companies hard, and always batters the stock market, and the government
and the Fed don’t want to do either of those things. So investors
almost always jump into the market and push stocks up when they get
some signal that the Fed is going to lower, or at least hold the line
on interest rates. With rates effectively set at 0, the Fed can’t lower
them, but it is saying, no doubt with the bad news about unemployment
in mind, that it won’t be raising them anytime soon.

But there is another reason high unemployment may excite investors.
Current layoffs are likely, for many workers, to be permanent. A recent
report that productivity—work output per worker—was up at a 9.5 annual
rate in the Third Quarter, is an indication that those companies that
haven’t shut down operations are making or doing more with fewer
workers. That kind of thing happens in recessions, because as
joblessness gets worse, those workers who still have jobs become more
docile and are willing to be worked harder by management. Of course,
you get more on-the-job injuries, more stress-related illness, etc.
along with that kind of speed-up, but over the shorter term, it looks
good on the books if you’re cranking out more product with a lower
payroll.

Of course, longer term, this is all a disaster, not just for
laid-off and afraid-to-be-laid-off workers, but for the country as a
whole. You can’t rebuild an economy with more than one-in-ten workers
unemployed. And remember, that’s just the people who are our of a job
and still looking for one; it doesn’t count those who have been out of
work for so long, or who work in professions that are so gone (like
construction or maybe manufacturing Saturns) that they’ve just given up
looking, or those who have taken part-time jobs in ice-cream parlors or
selling apples to survive but who want to be fully employed again. If
you add those people into the mix (which is the way the US used to
count unemployment until the 1980s), you get an unemployment rate
closer to 20%, or one in five! And you sure can’t rebuild an economy
with one in five workers unemployed.

That’s what makes all the happy talk in the news and in Washington
about the recession being over because last quarter showed a 3.5%
annualized jump in the so-called Gross Domestic Product so ridiculous.

Most of that rise was the result of government subsidies to
car-buyers and first-time house buyers. It was a one-shot stimulus that
pushed forward spending, but it was no indication of a recovering
economy, just a spasm of spending using taxpayer money. Furthermore, an
excellent article in Businessweek by Michael Mandel noted that fully
one-percent of that GDP gain was the result of a failure by government
economists to account for a collapse in corporate spending on research
and development and on training and retaining intellectual assets (a
complicated way of saying that engineers, scientists and technology
workers were being laid off at a higher rate than other workers, and
much R&D work was being shipped overseas for good), So really the
“growth” of GDP in the third Quarter should have been at a 2.5% rate,
and even that was largely government pump priming, not recovered
economic activity.

The truth is, we’re falling deeper into recession, and apparently,
according to the October unemployment figures, at an accelerating rate.
And there is no indication that the Obama Administration or the
Democratic Congress are planning any significant jobs-creation program.
They seem to be happy with this.

So quick, run out and buy some stock! It’s the American thing to
do. Probably not a bad idea either, since those dollars you are using
will keep sinking in value as long as the Fed is constrained from
jacking up interest rates.
______________

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

Tea Party vs. Two Party

mfinbh — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:10:29 -0500

The American two-party system is fracturing, as both sides are struggling with immense war debt, a crippled manufacturing base, and a Federal Reserve that is devaluating the currency in order to prop up financial institutions that gambled trillions and lost; their bets became our losses as they were “covered by the house”. Progressives have been decrying the centrist wishy-washiness of so many Democrats for years, and there was an outspoken expectation that once the Democrats were in power, new, more liberal parties could emerge to challenge the old-guard Democrats to veer left or be shown the door. The surprise is that the right beat them to it (and here's why that's fine...)

The Republican Party is imploding: many laughed as ½ term Gov. Sarah Palin walked away from her job in Alaska because she felt she could be more effective from outside government. Crazy? Foxy? Blithering idiot? None – and all – of the above; because La Palin has become the camera-ready face of the far right, and in the shallow world of contemporary media politics, that is about all it takes to grab attention (substance be damned).

Thus, the off-year special election in the 23rd congressional district of New York has given us a glimpse of the breakup of the Republican Party, as many of that party’s stalwarts have defected – following the Twittering Palin – to the Conservative Party, which has abandoned its longstanding tradition of simply endorsing the Republican, instead pushing a fairly conventional Republican out of the race. These conservatives mean business, and although they narrowly lost this race, don’t think for a minute that they won’t continue to pursue and fine-tune this method, forcing an ever purer version of the right’s hardcore ideology, previously reserved not for government, but for am talk radio.

Democrats should take no glee in the mess on the right, unless they play it right. It should be seen as a warning bell, because mainstream Democrats will be facing an enormous primary season push to the left in the coming month (with eleven months to go before the midterm elections). This week, MoveOn raised $2 million in pledges in one day to force the hand of the Democratic Party:

(from MoveOn solicitation letter 11/03/09)
"You tell us how much you'd give. Then, we make sure the media, Senate leadership, and conservative Democrats know just how many of us are willing to support a challenge against anyone who blocks reform. Hopefully, none of them actually do it, and health care gets an up-or-down vote.

But if the nightmare scenario happens, we'll encourage viable primary challengers to come forward, and if they do, make sure all of us who've pledged have a chance to support them. In other words, potential primary challengers will know there's a huge group of Americans who are ready to help. And conservative members of the Democratic Caucus will too."

This is an important move for the left, because there is an expressed intent to actively work within the Democratic Party, and that’s the key here. The effect of this effort won’t be the same in every district, and the Democratic Party could begin to rupture just as the Republicans have begun to do.

Where does it lead? Of course both sides would like to inject more ideological purity into their representation, but when there are four or six competing parties or factions, history has shown us that too often the worst hard-liners will win out.

Our currency is being devalued by a Federal Reserve using its power to prop up only the wealthiest investors (most of whom have moved their wealth out of this nation’s currency into high risk international trades), while millions more are going bankrupt and being put out of their homes and their jobs by the very institutions that were saved by the government (homes lost to foreclosure, jobs by the seized flow of credit that is killing small and mid-size companies). Many of the homeless and jobless now marching to the beat of Palin and her media tea party brigade find comfort in hate and scapegoating, worshiping a message of racial, ideological or even sexual purity.

We must heed history’s warnings. Millions of angry unemployed and displaced conservatives, given the direction of a charismatic leader (in today’s environment, probably from the media world), well-armed and hungry for power, can start a civil war. The contemporary American version would take the form of civil unrest and massive, coordinated riots, straining the resources of government authority.

There is activism and there is anarchy. Activism is the only civil approach. Let the Republicans fracture into two parties, but it is critical that liberals fix – and maintain – the Democratic Party, and thus retain a majority that can advance a progressive agenda. We must not allow a party schism to occur in the Democratic Party.

Please Join the conversation at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24771

2010 Looms: Democrats Crash and Burn in Virginia and New Jersey

dlindorff — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in
New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that
was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R.
Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican
candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a
tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about
Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion,
even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the
national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular
for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1
registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are
unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base.
No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief
executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.

But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New
Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence
that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case,
and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide
evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic
strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform,
global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support
for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are
unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for
Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and
high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change
has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president
now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory,
the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already
be headed for the rocks.

2010 is an election year that will see all seats in the House, and
a third of the seats in the Senate up for grabs. Typically, a
president’s party loses seats in that election even when things are
going well. When things are not going well, the losses can be
significant.

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of
Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive
change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all
Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and
immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with
Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset. He could have
announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in
motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead he dithered
on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these
disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own
disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term. He could have
declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash
program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a
leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in
this critical area. As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a
progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal
investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and
established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino
capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and
poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to
grow even bigger and more predatory.

Voters, their collective assets shrunken over the year by $14
trillion, understandably are left wondering how, aside from better
verbal skills, this president differs from the last one. As for the
Democratic Congress, with Democrats pretending that nothing can be done
unless they have not just 60 seats in Congress, but perhaps 70 or 75
(enough to be able to survive the inevitable defection of conservative
members of the party), they can’t do anything of consequence—a claim
that only is true if, as is the case, the party’s leadership and the
president are unwilling to punish those who break rank.

If Democratic and progressive independent voters feel the same way
about Obama and the Democratic Congress next fall, it will be curtains
for the Democrats and for Obama’s presidency, such as it is.

And you know what? It won’t matter much if that happens, because
what we’re seeing is that having Obama in the White House, and
Democrats “in control” of Congress doesn’t get you much in the way of
progressive change.
___________

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

The Democrats: Really, You Just Gotta Laugh

dlindorff — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:46:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the
White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the
health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been
hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of
helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real
health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone
of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the
uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a
third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance
business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of
eliminating any so-called “public option” or government-run health
insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance
industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of
Wall Street’s biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a
$3800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health
insurance plan from the private sector—a gift to the industry of some
40-50 million new captive customers.

But a combination of public outrage at this forced program of
compulsory insurance and recognition that the inevitable government
subsidy of low-income insurance buyers would be humongous has led
Congress to backtrack, and start backing away from the mandatory aspect
of this plan.

And now the private insurance industry, not satisfied that it has
managed to practically dictate the terms of the health reform
legislation so far, and angry that it might not get those 40-50 million
new forced customers, is reportedly threatening to turn around and
knife the president and the Democratic Congress in the back,

They’re threatening to (gasp!) start running attack ads on the “reform” legislation.

Remember the old “Harry and Louise” ads the industry ran attacking
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s health reform proposal back in the early
1990s? Well, this time, it’ll be Harry and Louise attacking ObamaCare.

I can see it now. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobby for
the insurance industry vultures, will set up some nice-sounding front
group with a name like People for a Healthier America, and they’ll fund
a new ad campaign like this:

Harry will be sitting at the breakfast table, reading the local
paper. He’ll look up from his coffee as Louise is puttering around by
the sink.

“This ObamaCare looks like it’s gonna drive up our insurance premiums, hon.”

“What do you mean Harry?”

“Well it says here that they’re not going to force the poor
folks to buy insurance, so most of ‘em will probably wait until they
get sick and then buy it.”

“Well what’s wrong with that, dear?”

“Nothin’ ‘cept that the law would also prohibit the insurance
companies from charging those sick folks higher premiums when they do
finally come in to buy insurance.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be unfair to charge them more, when they need it?”

“It might seem that way Louise, but if the insurance company
has to take a loss on them, they’re going to make it up by charging us
good folks who have insurance more.”

“Oh my god, Harry! We’re already paying $6,000 a year for our insurance. What will our premiums go up to?

“Says here they could go up by another $1000 a year!”

Announcer: Don’t let Congress make you pay for the uninsured.
Call your Senators and Representatives and the White House, and tell
them to demand that every American be required to buy insurance
immediately! This announcement is brought to you by People for a
Healthier America.

It’s funny really, to see Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), the biggest
recipient in Congress of insurance industry money, who has spent the
last few months working hand-in-glove with the insurance industry
lobbyists to craft a bill to their liking, suddenly accusing his
erstwhile financiers of doing a “hatchet job” on his bill. Actually,
his bill has been a hatchet job itself on the whole concept of health
care reform.

All of this, of course, was entirely predictable. Like HillaryCare
before it, ObamaCare has been doomed from the start by its
unwillingness to address the basic issue behind America’s twin crisis
of health care: lack of access for those with lower incomes, and
absurdly high cost for everyone.

What makes it all so pathetic is that America already has
an excellent model for delivering quality health care: a single-payer
system called Medicare. Everyone in America gets this program, just
like in Canada, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. The only
difference is that in those other countries, people get it from the day
they’re born. In America, you have to wait until you are permanently
disabled, or until you reach the age of 65.

Far from having to “start from scratch,” as Obama duplicitously
claimed in his last address to Congress in explaining why he was not
proposing a single-payer solution despite its obvious success in other
countries, solving America’s health crisis by adopting a single-payer
system would be a simply matter of taking a well proven system that
works and is popular, and expanding it to cover everybody.

But of course that would have made the insurance industry furious.
They’d have to go back to just selling life insurance and homeowners
insurance and car insurance.

And so we can expect a new round of “Harry and Louise,” and ObamaCare will go down in flames.

You have to laugh at these Democrats. Even when they brazenly try to sell out, they get screwed.

________________

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

Obamanologues at Flashpoint

obamanologues — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:26:07 -0400

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Obamanologues at Flashpoint
Theater (916 G Street NW,
Washington DC)

Written by R.M. Peete

Directed by
R.M. Peete

September 25
at 7 p.m.

September 26 at 7
p.m.

September 27 at 2
p.m.

September 30 –
October 3 at 7 p.m.

October 4 at 2 p.m.

October 7 at 7 p.m.

October 8 at 8:30
p.m.

October 9 – 10 at 7
p.m.

October 11 at 2 p.m.

[Pay-What-You-Can Previews: September 23 and 24 at
7:00 p.m.]
Tickets: available www.obamanologues.com and at the door

Ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, what
will you recall about the election of President Barack Obama?

Obamanologues provides a unique, historical account of a
one-of-a-kind event in U.S.
history with characters that represent diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds,
political affiliations, and socioeconomic groups.

With stories ranging from conversational
to rebellious to scholarly, Obamanologues
depicts emotions and behaviors displayed
by people in living rooms, classrooms, bus stops, and churches throughout the country.

This political theatre production is one
you do not want to miss!

There Are Really Two Questions: 1) Which Side are the Democrats on? and 2) Which Side are the Labor Unions on?

dlindorff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:03:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former
mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at
sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress
this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a
Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its
membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to
Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free
trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law
protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law
reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece mineworkers song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going
forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are
you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question. Reece, in her song,
was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason
Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in
recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece’s musical question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic
politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued
year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing
members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work
of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do
massive “get-out-the-vote” campaigns on Election Day, as they did this
past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama.
Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to
Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new
president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass
the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have
ended years of weakening of labor’s right to organize unions by ending
the cumbersome requirement for “secret ballot” elections to establish
union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards
supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats
in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed
the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty
iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place—a process which
managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to
subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new
workplaces.

It’s fine to say, as Trumka is doing, that labor will no longer
support politicians who sell-out labor on its issues, but what good is
that really, if those politicians simply replace labor with more money
from business interests? It doesn’t help things that once the sell-outs
get elected, instead of attacking their betrayals, labor gets sucked
into compromises. Just look at health care “reform.” For decades, the
labor movement has advocated a single-payer approach, yet when
President Obama and the Democrats began putting together a health
“reform” package this spring, most of organized labor started backing
the pathetic “public option” plan, buying into Obama’s pre-emptive
compromise approach. Now health care reform appears to be pretty much a
dead letter. The same thing is happening to labor law reform, with
labor caving in and backing a weakened version of the EFCA.

The only way to really make Democrats stop these kinds of betrayals
is for labor to decide “which side it is on” and to actively oppose those who sell labor out.

Trumka, as head of the AFL-CIO, is in a position to make a
fundamental change in labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
He should announce plans to encourage the formation of a new labor
party, which would run its own candidates for office in key districts.
Labor, uniquely, is in a position to do this. It has the money and the
numbers to be able to easily get on the ballot in every state even by
as early as next year.

In some states, like New York, parties are able to cross list
candidates, so instead of just endorsing a Democratic candidate who
seemed to be supportive, a labor party could nominate that person as
its own candidate. Votes for the candidate could be made either on the
Democratic line, or the labor party line. But to get on the labor party
line, a candidate would have to be a genuine labor party candidate.
Failure to back labor once in office would mean no more labor party
line.

And in states where there is not such cross listing allowed,
running candidates on a labor party ticket would be a much bigger
threat to sell-out Democrats than just running candidates in the
Democratic Primary. And with good candidates, some labor party
candidates would certainly win their races, becoming a third force in
Congress.

The time is ripe for a labor party. Polls report that more and more
people are quitting the Republican and Democratic Parties in disgust.
They have no home at this point, and labor party would offer them that
home, which would accelerate the decline of the two major
parties—basically hollowed out husks that only manage to stand up
because they are stuffed with corporate swag.

So what’s the answer President Trumka? Which side are you on?
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long-time
labor writer and activist. A founder of the National Writers Union, he
also organized a labor union of food service workers at Sarah Lawrence
College and worked on the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott in New
York City. He is author of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006) and his work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Progressives Should be Shutting Down These So-Called 'Town Meetings' Too!

dlindorff — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:09:13 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Many progressives are getting all bent out of shape over the "brown
shirt" rabble organized by health industry PR firms to disrupt the
so-called "town meetings" being organized all over the country by
Democratic members of Congress.

What they are conveniently forgetting is that these are not really
"town meetings" at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I
grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in
Connecticut--that is, meetings called and run democratically, with
leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.

These "town meetings" are really nothing but propaganda sessions run
by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent
credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud
of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive "reform" of the
US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control
of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the
hospital and drug industry.

ObamaCare is to health reform what bank bailouts are to financial
system reform, which is to say it is the opposite of what its name
implies.

The right-wing nuts who cry that ObamaCare is introducing euthanasia
for the elderly and infirm, or that it is socialism, are ignorant
wackos, to be sure, but they are right about one thing: Americans are
about to be royally screwed on health care reform by the president and
the Democratic Congress, just as they've been screwed by them on
financial system "reform."

The appropriate response to this screw-job is the one the right has
adopted: shut these sham "town meetings" down, and run the sell-out
politicians out of town on a rail, preferably coated in tar and
feathers they way the snake-oil salesmen of old used to be handled!

This is not about civil discourse. This is about propaganda. The
Obama administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership have
sold out health care reform for the tainted coin of the
medical-industrial industry, and are holding, or trying to hold, these
meetings around the country to promote legislation that has essentially
been written for them by that industry--legislation that will force
everyone to pay for insurance as offered, and priced, by the private
insurance industry. What a deal for those companies--a captive market
of 300 million people! There will be little or no effort to control
prices, and the higher costs will be financed through higher taxes, and
through cuts in Medicare benefits.

This isn't "reform." It's corruption, pure and simple.

Any mention of a system that works--single payer--the system we
already have in the form of Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and
the system that has proved successful for almost four decades in
Canada-- has been systematically blocked and censored out of the
discussion. Every effort has been made to bury an excellent bill, HR
676, offered up by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which would cover every
American by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better.

Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events,
progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of
calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing
them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own
both Democrats and Republicans alike.

The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation
currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it
and start over. At these "town meeting" staged events, Obama and the
Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don't want no
stinkin' ObamaCare. We want Medicare for all.
_________________

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

Health Care Reform Sell-Out: Why Obama and the Democrats are Either Shysters or Idiots

dlindorff — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:30:36 -0400

By Dave LIndorff

As I wrote months ago in an article titled America’s Stupid Health Care Debate: Keeping Some Ideas Off the Table and several subsequent pieces on my website,
President Obama and the Democrats who currently run Congress have been
hoist on their own collective petard by their craven and gutless
refusal to consider adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system to
finance health care in the US, or simply to expand Medicare, which is a
successful single- payer program, to cover everyone, instead of just
people over 65 and the disabled.

Instead, because they are the recipients of hundreds of millions of
dollars in legal (and probably plenty of illegal) bribes from the
health care industry, they have cobbled together a “reform” in name
only, which preserves not just the central role of the vampire-like
health insurance industry, but also ensures the continued rapacious
profitability of the other segments of the medical-industrial
complex—the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the specialist
doctors.

Now, like Hillary and Bill Clinton before them, these weasels and
slimeballs who pose as the people’s advocates are left with nothing but
a Potemkin Health Plan that looks on the outside lie a reform, but that
changes little or nothing, leaves vast numbers of Americans uninsured,
forces tens of millions to buy crappy plans from private companies, and
that will end up doing nothing to halt the continuing rise in health
care costs that is bankrupting the people, employers and the country.

Nice going guys!

Let’s for a moment consider what could have happened.

Medicare, which is wildly popular among seniors and the disabled
according to every poll I’ve seen, currently covers 45 million of the
highest-cost segment of this country’s 300 million people—its elderly
and its permanently disabled. It does this at a cost of $484 billion.

Now that’s a heck of a lot of money—about 13% of the federal
budget—but it’s money well spent. We’re talking about our parents and
grandparents here, and because they’re all covered by a government
single-payer plan that pays virtually all of their doctors’ and
hospital bills, we don’t have to pay those bills for them out of our
own pockets. Okay, there are problems—the drug industry managed during
the Bush/Cheney dark ages to get a prescription drug law passed that
bars Medicare from negotiating group discounts for drugs, and that has
added enormous rip-off costs to the program, but that’s just another
example of corporate scamming of the system that needs to be fixed. The
important point that needs to be made is that according to Medicare
analysts, 10 percent of Medicare beneficiaries account for fully two
–thirds of the total annual cost of Medicare.

What that tells you is that the cost of treating that 10% of the
elderly is $320 billion, while the healthier 90% of the elderly—roughly
40 billion people--only cost $160 billion a year to care for.

Now, given that the rest of the population under 65—about 255
million people—need on average far less care than the 90% of seniors
who are in that lower-cost group, extending care to them all would
clearly cost less than $1 trillion. Add in the cost of the 10% of
high-cost elderly, and you’ve got a total bill of $1.34 trillion to
care for everyone in America.

That’s a big number, but now you need to subtract out the total
cost of Medicaid—the crappy program that, primarily funded by the
states through income and sales taxes—pays for the crappy care of the
poor. That would be about $400 billion in 2009. So now we’re down to
$944 billion to care for all Americans. But from that we need to
subtract the cost of Veterans health care—another successful
single-payer program that already cares for veterans (or at least some
of them—it’s grossly underfunded). If we had a single-payer system for
all, we could just fold the Veterans Hospital system into the national
program. That would mean eliminating another $100 billion that would be
saved (because remember, we calculated that original expanded Medicare
budget for covering all 300 million of us. So now we’re down to an
annual budget of $844 billion for a single-payer program to cover all
Americans. Finally there is uncompensated care provided by hospitals to
those 47 million Americans who have no health insurance but who don’t
qualify for Medicaid. This care is funded in two ways—one by state and
county revenues, which come out of state income and sales taxes and
also out of local property taxes, and the other is in the form of
higher hospital charges and insurance premiums and Medicare costs for
the rest of us. Uncompensated care is estimated to cost about $200
billion, all of which would be eliminated if we had a single-payer plan
for all.

Okay, so now we’re down to a total net cost for a national
single-payer program of just $644 billion. Now remember, we’re talking
about expanding a single-payer program that we already have in place,
that doctors and hospitals are already familiar with, and that the
people who use it already like. And expanding it to cover everybody,
instead of just the old and disabled would only cost an added $160
billion, or just 33% more than it costs now to cover only the old and
disabled. In these days of trillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts, $160
billion is almost chump change—heck, it’s less than the cost of a year
of war in Afghanistan.

Sure it would still mean a modest tax increase for everyone (to
figure out how much, just look at your check stub, find the Medicare
tax deduction, and multiply it by 1.33. Then double that to account for
the employer share of the added funds). But wait, all you tax freaks!
Before you start freaking out at a tax hike and waving those little
teabags Fox TV got for you, there are more savings we haven’t
considered.

If everyone is covered by Medicare, that means no more out of
pocket payments by you for doctor bills. No more co-pays. No more
deductibles that you have to pay out of pocket before your health
insurance kicks in. No more employee contributions to health insurance
premiums, which these days more and more employers are forcing us to
pay. That’s a lot of money. For many families, it adds up to thousands
of dollars a year. But there’s more. Your employer, if the company is
one of the one in three that still provides and pays at least something
towards health benefits for its workers, would be off the hook. That
would free up a lot of money that could go to higher wages and salaries
for workers (especially if you have or get yourself a union to make
sure that the managers pass the savings on to you and don’t just pocket
it or pass it along to shareholders). We’re talking about big savings
here.

So while yes, your taxes would go up a bit to expand Medicare to
all, it wouldn’t be by much, and on the plus side, you would be saving
an enormous amount of money, making the added tax bite easy to swallow
(and remember, your state and local taxes could be reduced).

Why didn’t Obama and the Democrats tell you all this? Why does
Obama continue to diss single-payer, as he did to the American Medical
Association, and as he continues to do, claiming it is not in the
American addition, as though he never heard about Medicare?

Well, as a matter of fact, some people in Congress, notably Reps.
John Conyers (D-MI), Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh), Anthony Wiener )D-NY) and
83 other members of the House are pushing a bill, HR 676, which would
do exactly what I’m suggesting—expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

It is being opposed by the Congressional leadership to the point
that advocates at one House committee hearing were ejected and arrested
for even mentioning the term single-payer. With the blessing of the
White House.

Clearly, Obama and the Democrat Party and Congressional leadership are in bed with the health care profiteers.

There is no other excuse for failure to do the obvious, and have
America adopt some version of the kind of health care system that has
been proven to be more effective and far, far cheaper than our own in
every other developed nation in the world—and in many less developed
nations, too.

My question: How long are we going to stand for this crap?
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is the
author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital
Chains” (Bantam, 1992) and more recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Of Blue Dogs and Pink Jellyfish

dlindorff — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:51:45 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

What’s the difference between a Blue Dog Democrat and a progressive
Democrat? One is a vertebrate with a spine and a willingness to bite.
The other is a jellyfish with no spine and no teeth.

This difference has been glaringly apparent in the current fight over health care reform.

The Blue Dogs in House and Senate have been giving the progressive
Democrats an object lesson in how a small group in Congress can get its
way. They have threatened to withhold their support for the Obama
Administration’s key policy objective of a health reform package, and
have managed, with just a handful of votes between them, to remove
almost all progressive content from that legislation by threatening to
walk if they don’t get their way.

Compare that to the progressives—a much larger faction within the
Democratic Party majority in both houses. There are plenty of articles
currently circulating in the media talking about progressive rage and
dissatisfaction, both among progressives at large, and among
progressives in Congress, over the bills that are emerging in
committees in both the House and Senate—bills that are gutting any
reference to a genuine so-called “public option” government insurance
plan that would actually compete with and challenge private insurance
companies, and that have studiously avoided having anything to do with
a single-payer approach, bills that call for actually cutting back on
Medicare, the wildly successful single-payer program that since 1965
has been providing health care for the elderly and the disabled. But
none of the dissatisfied progressive Democrats in Congress, and only a
few of the progressive political organizations operating outside of
Congress, have threatened to bolt and oppose the sell-out legislation
that is being produced in Congress, or to stop supporting those
Democrats in Congress who are caving in to the pressure from the health
industry lobbies. And certainly none of those progressive groups have
told the president that he will no longer have their support if he
doesn’t insist on a much bolder and progressive health reform bill.

Given the power that the small Blue Dog Democratic Caucus has
demonstrated by threatening to rebel and vote against a health reform
bill, just imagine the power that Progressive Caucus would have if it
were to collectively threaten a “No” vote. Just imagine the different
path that health reform legislation would be taking in Congress today
if progressive organizations like trade unions, netroots organizations,
and others were to tell President Obama that they would withhold their
backing in 2010 from any member of Congress who didn’t vote for a
single-payer plan, or that he could no longer count on their support in
2012 if he failed to push for single-payer today.

This is the lesson of the current disaster of health reform in
Congress, and it is just the latest chapter in the failed history of
progressive Democratic politics.

It’s fine to work to elect progressives to Congress, and to send a
Democrat, progressive or not, to the White House, given that there is
no chance for progressive change while Republicans are in charge, and
given the institutional obstacles and the fratricidal internal
conflicts that prevent the rise of a viable Third Party alternative,
but progressive voters and progressive organizations have forgotten the
lesson of the Civil Rights and Anti-Indochina War movements. That
lesson is that elections are only a small first step, and that only
mass movements operating outside of Washington and outside of electoral
politics—mass movements that threaten the Democrats who are currently
in power—can produce progressive change.

The power of the Blue Dogs in Congress is derived from the fact
that despite their small number, they are numerous enough that, if they
stick together, they can derail a progressive reform bill.

But imagine how much more powerful the progressive caucus in House and Senate would be if it took the same tack.

Progressives in Congress, if they developed spines and teeth and
ceased being jellyfish, could threaten to vote against every bill
offered by those same Blue Dogs, unless they supported real health
reform—that is, a single-payer plan such as the one being put forward
today by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). If they were backed up by
progressive grass roots organizations that let it be known that support
would end for any Democrat not backing single-payer reform, we could
have that reform.

Instead, we have jellyfish on the left, and both the president and
the Democrats in Congress, know that they can ignore the left, because
it will support them no matter what they do.

That is not to say that allthe Democrats in Congress are jellyfish--just most of them. Conyers, who showed jellyfish-like characteristics on the impeachment issue during the Bush/Cheney era, has been outspoken in his criticism of the Obama administration, and has offered a real single-payer alternative. And last week, at a gathering of Progressive Democrats of America in Washington, Conyers warned that Obama risks being a one-term president, saying to him, "Buddy, you are wrong on healthcare and it's going to cost you big time."

Still for the most part, progressives in Congress and at large across the country were quiet as Obama slimed single-payer and moved the debate to the right, only taking a stand at all on the already minimalist issue of whether there will be any kind of "public option" in the resulting legislation, however weak. And even there, few progressive members of Congress have actually vowed to vote down such a lame measure if there's no public option, or just a weak one.

Note: Today is the day that Congress will vote on Rep. Conyers’ single-payer bill (HR 676). For information on how to join in the fight for Single Payer, go to AfterDowningStreet.org or PNHP.org
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Dark Days But a Ray of Hope for Embattled Workers

dlindorff — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:29:33 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the
labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the
embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform”
legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much
less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by
party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back
EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to
join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement
with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in
union-organizing drives.

But largely unnoticed by the corporate media, there has been some
really important good news for working people and the labor movement:
the appointment of three people to fill the long-vacant empty seats on
the five-member National Labor Relations Board, which has the ultimate
job of adjudicating issues under the National Labor Relations Act.

The Bush administration had basically gutted the NLRA by simply
failing, since 2007, to fill the three seats that had been emptied as
prior board members’ five-year terms had expired. This had left the
NLRB with only two members, one a Democratic, pro-labor appointee, and
one a Republican pro-management appointee. Since these two members
would vote on opposite sides of most issues, the only issues they ended
up issuing decisions on were 400 particularly egregious cases, where
they could both agree—and most of those are still in legal limbo since
they have been challenged in court on the basis that board rules
require a three-member quorum.

The Obama administration, in April, announced three new
appointments to fill the vacant seats...

For the rest of this story, please go to:
www.thiscantbehappening.net
_____________________

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