AlterNet: The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

 

The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Posted on December 22, 2009, Printed on December 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144755/

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade.

If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless 'Oligarchs' in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class.

At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq.

Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '"very low food security," meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger.

8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.

7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin's Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people's mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights under vague and unconstitutional rubrics such as 'providing material aid to terrorists,'(rights which seem unlikely ever to be restored).

6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America's great cities. The administration's unconcern about the unsound dam infrastructure, about climate change, and about the fate of the victims are all a wake-up call for what all of us have in store from the small social class that Bush served.

5. The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration's attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow. It should have been nipped in the bud, but was not. Once an insurgency becomes well established, it is defeated militarily only about 20 percent of the time. Eight years later, the Neoconservative thrust into Central Asia (in search of hydrocarbon leverage, or in a geopolitical pissing match with Russia and China?) of the early years of this decade has bequeathed us yet another war, this time one that could destabilize neighboring Pakistan-- the world's sole Muslim nuclear power.

4. The Iraq War, which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over as million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion.

3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda's largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslimm country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty). Al-Qaeda was a small fringe crackpot group of murderous conspiracy theorists, since most of what they considered an American 'occupation' of Muslims was no such thing. The leasing of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? They intended to make themselves look like a world-historical force, and the US new Oligarchs, who no longer had the international Communist conspiracy with which to scare the American public into letting them have their way, were happy to buy in to the hyping of al-Qaeda, as well. But the catastrophe was not only the attacks, deadly and horrific though they were, but the alacrity with which Americans rsurrendered their birthright of yeoman liberties to a Bonapartist regime that ran roughshod over law, the constitution, the Congress, and anyone, such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared oppose it.

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.

Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and maintains the popular blog Informed Comment.

© 2009 Informed Comment All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144755/

AlterNet: The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

Op-Ed Columnist - Disaster and Denial - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Disaster and Denial - NYTimes.com 

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.
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And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Disaster and Denial - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Disaster and Denial - NYTimes.com 

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.
Skip to next paragraph

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Bernanke’s Unfinished Mission - NYTimes.com

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Op-Ed Columnist - Bernanke’s Unfinished Mission - NYTimes.com

Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, recently had some downbeat things to say about our economic prospects. The economy, he warned, “confronts some formidable headwinds.” All we can expect, he said, is “modest economic growth next year — sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate, but at a pace slower than we would like.”
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Paul Krugman

Actually, he may have been too optimistic: There’s a good chance that unemployment will rise, not fall, over the next year. But even if it does inch down, one has to ask: Why isn’t the Fed trying to bring it down faster?

Some background: I don’t think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we’re in. You can’t just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs — more than 100,000 a month — to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment.

How big? My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of “only” 11,000 in November, in perspective. It was basically a terrible report, which was reported as good news only because we’ve been down so long that it looks like up to the financial press.

So if we’re going to have any real good news, someone has to take responsibility for creating a lot of additional jobs. And at this point, that someone almost has to be the Federal Reserve.

I don’t mean to absolve the Obama administration of all responsibility. Clearly, the administration proposed a stimulus package that was too small to begin with and was whittled down further by “centrists” in the Senate. And the measures President Obama proposed earlier this week, while they would create a significant number of additional jobs, fall far short of what the economy needs.

But while economic analysis says that we should have a large second stimulus, the political reality is that the president — faced with total obstruction from Republicans, while receiving only lukewarm support from some in his own party — probably can’t get enough votes in Congress to do more than tinker at the edges of the employment problem.

The Fed, however, can do more.

Mr. Bernanke has received a great deal of credit, and rightly so, for his use of unorthodox strategies to contain the damage after Lehman Brothers failed. But both the Fed’s actions, as measured by its expansion of credit, and Mr. Bernanke’s words suggest that the urgency of late 2008 and early 2009 has given way to a curious mix of complacency and fatalism — a sense that the Fed has done enough now that the financial system has stepped back from the brink, even though its own forecasts predict that unemployment will remain punishingly high for at least the next three years.

The most specific, persuasive case I’ve seen for more Fed action comes from Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed staffer now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Basing his analysis on the prior work of none other than Mr. Bernanke himself, in his previous incarnation as an economic researcher, Mr. Gagnon urges the Fed to expand credit by buying a further $2 trillion in assets. Such a program could do a lot to promote faster growth, while having hardly any downside.

So why isn’t the Fed doing it? Part of the answer may be political: Ideological opponents of government activism tend to be as critical of the Fed’s credit expansion as they are of the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus. And this has probably made the Fed reluctant to use its powers to their fullest extent. Meanwhile, a significant number of Fed officials, especially at the regional banks, are obsessed with the fear of 1970s-style inflation, which they see lurking just around the bend even though there’s not a hint of it in the actual data.

But there’s also, I believe, a question of priorities. The Fed sprang into action when faced with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives.

And that is what we’re talking about here. The kind of sustained high unemployment envisaged in the Fed’s own forecasts is a recipe for immense human suffering — millions of families losing their savings and their homes, millions of young Americans never getting their working lives properly started because there are no jobs available when they graduate. If we don’t get unemployment down soon, we’ll be paying the price for a generation.

So it’s time for the Fed to lose that complacency, shrug off that fatalism and start lending a hand to job creation.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Reform or Else - NYTimes.com

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

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Paul Krugman

But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

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Op-Ed Columnist - A Recovery for Some - NYTimes.com

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November 14, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A Recovery for Some
By BOB HERBERT

President Obama’s strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor — and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.

Now we’re learning that unmarried women are among those being crushed by the epidemic of joblessness. As the Center for American Progress has noted, “The high unemployment rate of unmarried women, and particularly the 1.3 million unemployed female heads of household who are primary breadwinners for their families, is devastating to their financial circumstances and standard of living.”

Mr. Obama announced this week that he would convene a jobs summit at the White House next month to explore ways of putting Americans back to work. It remains to be seen whether the summit will yield anything substantial. But it’s fair to wonder why the president and his party have not been focused like fanatics on job creation from the first day he took office.

It was the financial elites who took the economy down, and it was ordinary working people, the longtime natural constituents of the Democratic Party, who were buried in the rubble. Mr. Obama and the Democrats have been unconscionably slow in riding to the rescue of those millions of Americans struggling with the curse of joblessness.

We’ve been hearing that there are six unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S., but even that terrible figure is deceptive. There are 25 unemployed construction workers for every job opening in their field, and more than a dozen for every opening in the durable goods industries, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

This was not a normal recession, and we are not on the cusp of anything like a normal recovery. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.7 percent. The underemployment rate for blacks in September (the latest month for which figures are available) was a gut-wrenching 23.8 percent and for Hispanics an even worse 25.1 percent. The poverty rate for black children is almost 35 percent.

Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.

It will take a monumental leadership effort by the administration and Congress to spark the kind of changes necessary to transform this wretched employment landscape. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute has written: “By itself, the private sector is unable to create jobs in the numbers the United States needs to obtain a robust, full economic recovery.”

If that’s true, and I have long believed it to be the case, then we need to rethink our entire approach to employment. Conventional efforts to kick-start economic growth are dwarfed by the vast scale of the problem. Bold new efforts — creative efforts — are needed.

A recent survey for the policy institute found that one in four families had been hit by a job loss during the past year and 44 percent had suffered either the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or hours worked. Economic insecurity has spread like a debilitating virus through scores of millions of American families.

What kind of recovery are we talking about if blue-collar workers, and men and women without college degrees, and large percentages of ethnic minorities and the young and the poor are not part of it? And how can any recovery be sustained if economic insecurity is a permanent feature of even middle-class life?

The financial elites have flourished in recent decades to a great extent because they have had government on their side, with the politicians working diligently to ensure that rules, regulations and tax policies established an environment in which the elites could thrive. For ordinary Americans, it has been a different story, with jobs shipped overseas by the millions and wages remaining stagnant, with labor unions under constant assault and labor standards weakened, with the safety net shredded and the message sent out to workers everywhere: You’re on your own.

We’ll get a chance to see at President Obama’s employment summit whether anything much has changed.

an interesting bit of computer trivia...

"According to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (174 KB PDF), manufacturing one desktop computer and monitor requires 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water. Unlike most appliances which require more energy to use than to manufacture, it takes much more energy to produce a computer than that computer will consume in its lifetime. A report from United Nations University indicates that building a computer takes five times more energy than that computer will use throughout the rest of its life..."

---

November 9, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Paranoia Strikes Deep

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Paul Krugman
November 6, 2009

House Republican leaders have produced their own health care reform bill. Here is the first thing you need to know: It would do almost nothing to reduce the scandalously high number of Americans who have no insurance. And it makes only a token stab at slowing the relentlessly rising costs of medical care.
Despite that, the Republicans are pitching their bill as far more affordable than the Democrats’ approach. And you are sure to hear a lot in coming days about how it could reduce health insurance premiums. How it compares in that respect with the Democratic proposal is not yet clear. But a lot of the Republicans’ savings on premiums come from reduced coverage. Pay less and get less.

The good news is that this bill has no chance of passing. The bad news is that unless the White House and Congressional Democrats push back with the hard facts, the Republicans could use it to spread false hope of a “cheaper” alternative to scuttle real health care reform.

There’s no question that the Republicans’ bill is cheaper because it does so little to help the uninsured. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would provide $61 billion over 10 years to expand coverage, compared with more than $1 trillion in the Democrats’ bill.

That paltry effort, the budget office estimates, would extend coverage to a few million people who would otherwise be uninsured in 2019, leaving 52 million citizens and legal residents below Medicare age without coverage or about 17 percent of that population, right where it is today. This is a dismaying abdication of responsibility.

The Republican bill is an amalgam of market-oriented and state-based reforms that conservatives have long proposed, including enhancement of tax-sheltered accounts to help pay premiums and allowing people to buy insurance in other states that might permit skimpier benefits than their home state.

It has some good provisions, such as prohibiting insurers from imposing annual or lifetime caps on what they will pay and automatic enrollment of workers in employer-sponsored group coverage. But it would not prevent insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums based on pre-existing conditions.

The Republicans have been railing that the Democratic reforms will do little to slow the rapid rise in medical costs. But neither party has a solution. The Republican bill would cap malpractice awards — a clear infringement of the rights of injured patients. It would get lesser savings by requiring electronic transactions for administrative tasks and opening an approval process for generic biological medicines. The Democratic bills would use both of those for savings and initiate an array of pilot projects to try to find solutions.

The Republican bill’s main emphasis is on reducing the cost of health insurance premiums, a real concern. Compared with current trends, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the Republican bill, the average premium would drop by 7 to 10 percent for employees enrolled in group plans at small businesses and by 5 to 8 percent for people who buy their own policies. At large employers, where most Americans get group coverage, the average premium might drop by a modest 0 to 3 percent.

Part of the premium reduction was attributed to savings in the cost of medical services. But much was attributed to shrinking the services covered. The Democrats plan to set minimum benefit requirements to protect people from skimpy policies that leave them without adequate protection when they need it.

The budget office is planning to estimate how the far more complex Democratic bills would affect premiums. Americans need to know that so they can make a full comparison. But there should be no illusions here. The “affordable” Republican health care reform isn’t health care reform.

Well, well, well. The Fourth Estate has its undies in a bundle because the Obama administration has finally called out one of the networks for being lying, denigrating, vicious twisters of the truth.

This entity, which frequently feeds stories to the mainstream media or bashes them until they will cover such a story, hates anyone to the left of John Birch. Its parade of hate has been consistent and consistently laden with derision for the elected president, Barack Obama.

And to accurately portray Fox, this happens throughout the day, NOT just in commentary, as John Nichols' Oct. 21 commentary in the Cap Times implies.

That Fox hates anyone "liberal" enough to challenge invading other nations illegally, spying on citizens without warrants, torturing prisoners, and challenging the hubris and greed of Wall Street is commonly known to everyone with a brain bigger than a bean.

That Fox typically invites discredited commentators like Dick Morris to lay the foundation for a complete national decline under Obama is not a surprise. If this were the end of the story, one might agree with the pundits from the left that trying to fight Fox is wrong.

But Fox is not being called to task solely because of the lunacy of Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck. It is being called out for deliberately trying to create questionable or false stories or distort the angles on stories during its so-called "news" presentations. And were the damage limited to those who demand only the perspective that satisfies their minuscule minds, as Nichols and others point out, one needn't pursue it.

However, the gutless and profit-driven Fourth Estate is not what it used to be. Far too many of these distorted stories (ACORN is a perfect example) find their way into or are jammed down the throat of the mainstream media.

The press, and close on their heels the Congress, run willy-nilly trying to ensure they can't be accused of being liberal, picking up nonsense as if it were gold. CNN finds time to take Fox stories at face value while fact-checking "Saturday Night Live"!

The truly salient fact is the way the media, including the lefties like Nichols, circle the wagons anytime someone calls them out on their perfidy. Attack one, you attack all! The freedom of the press must go unchallenged! A president who points out even the most outrageous liars in the media will be branded a whiner.

So I say to the media: You are no longer deserving of the title "Fourth Estate." You are so corporatized as to have abandoned virtually all of the principles that gave you that vaunted status. Your quest is now the bottom line, not a Jeffersonian ideal. You cut staffs to bare bones and limit your investigative reporting to who's screwing who and balloon boy stories.

You don't search for truth but rather seek two contrasting opinions, no matter how crazy one of them might be. You seek controversy over insight. And you do it in a world that depends on you to get it right now more than ever before.

If the media want to see the true whiners, the fearful, the abdicators of a vaunted role, they need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. That is, if they can get their heads out of the sand long enough to do so.

Thomas E. Dixon Jr. is a Madison resident.

Editorial - The Unemployed Wait - NYTimes.com

October 17, 2009
Editorial
The Unemployed Wait

More than a million jobless Americans are in danger of losing benefits by the end of the year unless Congress passes an extension of unemployment insurance. The House has acted, but the Senate, which has a better bill, has been bogged down by obstruction from Republicans. In these extraordinarily hard times, Congress should extend this vital safety net without further delay.

Unemployment insurance, one of the great legacies of the New Deal, is intended to provide laid-off workers with an income while they look for their next job. With the unemployment rate at nearly 10 percent nationally — and at 10.3 percent in New York City — it has been hard to line up that next job. The Department of Labor recently reported that there were more than six people looking for every opening.

There are now more than five million Americans — roughly one-third of the unemployed — who have been out of work for six months or longer, according to the National Employment Law Project, a record since data was first recorded in 1948.

Benefits vary by state, but most cut off benefits after 26 weeks. Congress has extended benefits several times, most recently in February, but for many workers they are again running out.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and other Democrats have introduced a bill that would extend unemployment insurance by up to an additional 14 weeks in all 50 states, with another six weeks for states with a jobless rate above 8.5 percent. It is an improvement on a bill passed by the House, which would extend benefits only in states with unemployment above 8.5 percent.

February’s extension, which included a $25-a-week increase in benefits, kept 800,000 people out of poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Putting more money in the pockets of the unemployed provided much-needed stimulus for the entire economy.

Every day that the Republicans continue to block an extension — fighting over amendments to the bill or delaying a vote — means thousands more Americans pushed closer to the edge of despair.

Yet another reason to be 'armed and dangerous'

Excite News - Police: Fla. man kills fiancee on eve of wedding

WINTER SPRINGS, Fla. (AP) - A man who thought there was an intruder in his house shot and killed his fiancee the day before they were to be married, police said Friday.

"Right now everything points to a tragic accident," Police Chief Kevin Brunelle told The Associated Press, adding investigators were awaiting forensic results.

John Tabutt, 62, told investigators he got his gun when he thought he heard an intruder, then fired at a figure in the hallway, according to Brunelle. It was Tabutt's live-in fiancee, 62-year-old Nancy Dinsmore, who family members say he was going to marry Saturday. Tabutt told authorities he thought she was next to him in bed the whole time.

A message left for a phone number listed for the house was not returned.

Brunelle said no charges have been filed against Tabutt, adding the information he provided has been verified and he appeared "very distraught."

Tabutt was "very concerned about her well-being," standing by while she was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, Brunelle added.

The couple planned to wed in a small ceremony Saturday at St. Stephen Catholic Church in Winter Springs, Dinsmore's son-in-law Scott Sposato, of Vero Beach, told the Orlando Sentinel.

"They loved each other," he said. "It was quite apparent."

Tabutt called 911 shortly after 2:30 a.m. Friday, moaning and sobbing, the newspaper reported.

"I thought I had an intruder in the house," he told the emergency dispatcher. "Honest to God, she looks dead."

He then thought he heard her take a breath.

"Hang in there, Honey. Hang in there," he said.

Winter Springs is about 15 miles north of Orlando.

Jim's Place

My recent letter to my representatives:

Dear Senator/Congressman,

I take this opportunity to write and express my extreme frustration, and anger, in the current ongoing ‘debate’ over Health Care Reform; and specifically the so-called Public Option.

I have been a lifelong supporter, and occasional member, of the Democratic Party because it most closely approximates my feelings of equality and social justice. The current state of our health care system is an abomination and embarrassment compared with other advanced nations. The idea that we should be solely at the mercy of a profit driven system for life sustaining health care is beyond immoral.

With the election of Barak Obama and a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress, I and most other progressive minded supporters naively believed we were on the cusp of meaningful change in issues ranging from the conduct of national policy, to the all important issue of health care. Instead, what we are faced with is the continuation of far too many of the failed policies of the Bush years, and a capitulation to the conservative minority on issues of social justice.

Until the Democratic Party displays the necessary courage and resolve to put the voters’ mandate into meaningful policy change (an equitable national health care policy, financial regulation with real teeth, and a more thorough reevaluation of our failed foreign policy), I will find it impossible to provide active support of Democratic candidates who seem to have lost sight of the progressive mission.

I believe it’s time that our elected majority accept the fact that WE WON THE ELECTION! Take example from your Republican predecessors and forge ahead with the policy change you promised. For their many failures, Republican’s don’t appear at all concerned with focusing on ‘bi-partisanship’ when they’re in power, and are willing to use any election mandate, real or concocted, to forward their right-wing ideology. Have the past 8 years taught us nothing?

Respectfully,

Jim's Place

Paul Krugman: 10/5/09

Op-Ed Columnist - The Politics of Spite - NYTimes.com

October 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Politics of Spite
By PAUL KRUGMAN

There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.

Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.

But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

Second test

Test

In Wal-Mart's Image | The American Prospect

In Wal-Mart's Image

The "values" of the largest private-sector employer in the U.S. are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing.


Harold Meyerson | September 11, 2009



In Wal-Mart's Image


(AP Photo)


The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business by Nelson Lichtenstein, Metropolitan Books, 311 pages, $25.00

Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America by Lawrence B. Glickman, University of Chicago Press, 403 pages, $45.00

The story isn't part of the official Wal-Mart creation epic, but it tells us almost all we need to know about the company's approach to the interests of its employees and the laws of the nation. Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

Besides its Dickensian shock value, this story -- told by Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book about Wal-Mart -- points to a phenomenon of wider significance. The company that was willing to break the law to avoid paying the minimum wage is now the largest private-sector employer in the nation and the world, with 1.4 million employees in the United States and 2 million overall, more than 6,000 stores, and revenues that exceed those of Target, Home Depot, Sears, Kmart, Safeway, and Kroger -- combined. By virtue of its size and its mastery of logistics, Wal-Mart is able to demand low prices from its thousands of suppliers and thus inflict low wages on their employees. Its low prices have also forced reductions in wages and benefits at the unionized supermarkets with which it threatens to compete.

As the unionized General Motors was big enough to set the pattern for the employment of nonprofessional Americans in the three decades following World War II, Wal-Mart is now so big it is setting the pattern today. Each created a distinct national buying public for its goods that was far larger than its immediate work force: in GM's case, workers who could afford to buy new cars; in Wal-Mart's, workers who could afford to shop nowhere except Wal-Mart. With Wal-Mart's rise, the same traditional values that underpinned Sam Walton's cheating and threatening of his workers -- contempt for Yankee laws and regulations, and a preference for the authoritarian, low-wage labor system of the South -- have become more the norm than the exception in America's economic life.

For the past year, Americans have focused, and understandably so, on the ways in which Wall Street has misshaped the American economy, how finance has grown large over the past 20 years as manufacturing has shrunk. But the rise of finance is just half the story; it takes the rise of retail to complete the tale. Both Wall Street and Wal-Mart played a central role in the deindustrialization of the United States: 40,000 U.S factories were closed between 2001, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, and 2007, during which years Wal-Mart's Chinese imports tripled in value from $9 billion to $27 billion.

The rise of Wal-Mart, and the national economy it has shaped in its image, is a story that Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is eminently suited to tell. He's also the author of The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, a biography of United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther that is one of the definitive accounts of the rise of the unionized, high-wage, mid-20th-century economy that Wal-Mart has done so much to destroy. The Retail Revolution now tells the story of how Walton, strongly abetted by Ronald Reagan, pulled down the world that Reuther, strongly abetted by Franklin Roosevelt, created. It is not the definitive scholarly history that Lichtenstein's Reuther biography is, but it is surely the best account we have of Wal-Mart's metamorphosis from a backwater chain to the nation's dominant corporation, and it contains more direct reporting than is normally found in the works of historians. The story of Walton's minimum-wage evasion came from Lichtenstein's interviews with former Wal-Mart executives.

Lichtenstein's account of Wal-Mart's rise isn't uniformly negative. Walton and his top lieutenants, following in the footsteps of such American economic icons as Henry Ford, can point to hugely important business innovations that stand alongside their social primitivism. As Ford revolutionized production, so Walton revolutionized distribution and logistics -- the business of getting the product from the plant to the store in the fastest, cheapest, most efficient way possible. Well before other retailers, he understood the potential of the barcode for tracking the supply and demand for products. He changed warehouses from giant storage rooms to distribution centers where products arriving from ports or plants were turned around and delivered to stores within a day. He invested in more computer technology and communications satellites than his rivals, and developed better data on which goods moved and how best to sell them than their manufacturers (even venerable firms like Proctor & Gamble) possessed. Once Wal-Mart became America's retail giant, he compelled suppliers like P&G to seek Wal-Mart's approval for new products and its help in crafting them. The data also enabled Wal-Mart to manage its stores from its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, reducing store managers to foremen under constant pressure to sell more and spend less.

But Wal-Mart's distinctive identity came from fusing its brilliant use of new technology with its rigorous adherence to the old exploitative Southern labor practices. The Southern traditionalism of Walton and his lieutenants dictated that the stores' managers would be men and its salesclerks women, and no federal statute or class-action lawsuit has been able to dethrone that tradition yet. Wal-Mart is also famously, pathologically anti-union, but its antipathy toward its nonunion work force is no less remarkable. The firm prohibits overtime pay (even before the current recession, the average Wal-Mart employee worked 34 hours a week), offers health-insurance plans that fewer than 50 percent of its U.S. workers opt to purchase (the most common plan contains a $3,000 annual family deductible, a great deal of money for workers making a little more than the minimum wage), and keeps its labor costs down to 10 percent of sales, in contrast to levels of 11 percent to 13 percent for its discount retail competitors.

Annual turnover among employees is huge -- 40 percent in most recent years, though in the late 1990s, when unemployment was low, it reached a staggering 70 percent. Wal-Mart seldom discharges employees, an act that would require it to pay penalties if the government found a pattern of excessive firings. Rather, it simply gives its workers such unwieldy schedules and such impossible work loads that quitting, like low prices, is an everyday constant. So, as Lichtenstein documents, is employee theft -- a problem that Wal-Mart addressed by locking in its night shifts until public exposure brought that practice to an end.

Wal-Mart has succeeded brilliantly throughout the NAFTA nations. It has become the biggest retailer in both Canada and Mexico (and it staved off unionization of its Canadian stores by closing down the one whose workers voted to go union). But it had to withdraw from Germany, where the laws regulating hours and wages made its normal business practices impossible, and has also fared poorly in Japan. As Lichtenstein notes, in nations such as Germany and Japan, where high disposable incomes are "shared relatively equally throughout the population, Wal-Mart's EDLP [Every Day Low Prices] policy is not so much of a trump card." Wal-Mart's efforts in Germany were not helped by the fact that its policy of encouraging workers to call in anonymously to report on misdeeds (including union sentiments) of their fellow workers reminded Germans of the late, unlamented Stasi.

Wal-Mart's more serious failure of market penetration remains its inability to break into America's major coastal cities or Chicago. There, the specter of its superstores -- stores that include supermarkets, whose success has already given Wal-Mart 30 percent of the U.S. retail food market -- poses a direct threat to unionized supermarket workers. In 2003, Southern California supermarkets, after decades of mutually profitable labor relations, told the United Food and Commercial Workers that they would have to reduce wages and benefits to compete with Wal-Mart, and, after breaking the union's strike, imposed a contract in which new hires were offered not the traditional health insurance package but one modeled on Wal-Mart's. At the time, the proportion of Southern California grocery workers with health insurance stood at 94 percent; by 2007, it had declined to 54 percent.

After that defeat, the unions and its allies fought back, convincing city councils and governmental agencies in big East Coast and California cities to use zoning ordinances and bans on big-box stores to keep Wal-Mart out of town. Public indignation over the company's labor practices has also contributed to its inability to enter blue-state markets.

With its stock price stagnant for nearly a decade due in part to its failure to expand to blue-state America, and with Democrats now in control in Washington, Wal-Mart is currently undergoing a great cosmetic makeover. It has announced it will develop a green profile for all the products it sells and has even proclaimed its support for an employer mandate in any emerging health-reform package. What it is not willing to relinquish is its die-hard opposition to unions and labor-law reform, its existential commitment to the Southern model of labor relations. Wal-Mart cannot thrive in a nation where prosperity is broadly shared, and it will do all it can to keep that from happening.

That wal-mart has been waylaid in part by the political expression of indignant consumers should come as no surprise to readers of Lawrence Glickman's Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. As Glickman, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, makes clear, Americans have a long, if largely forgotten, history of supporting political causes by withdrawing their patronage from certain stores or products -- including efforts by abolitionists to establish stores that sold clothing free from the taint of plantation cotton, and by Southern slavers to boycott products made in the North. Of particular interest are the efforts that Glickman has uncovered of urban Southern blacks to resist the coming of Jim Crow by boycotting newly segregated municipal streetcar lines at the turn of the century -- including a Montgomery, Alabama, streetcar boycott 55 years before Rosa Parks sat down in one of the front seats of a Montgomery bus.

But it is one thing for Glickman to rescue these campaigns from history's dustbin and quite another for him to give them an importance that most of them do not deserve. In the battles for the abolition of slavery, for worker rights and for civil rights, the actions of sympathetic consumers seldom amounted to more than a sideshow. Glickman sometimes makes too much of them, and when he turns his attention to the battle for consumer rights during the 1960s and 1970s, he accords it a centrality that other historians of the time might have trouble recognizing. Ignoring the pivotal role that the politics of race played in the demise of the mid-20th-century Democratic majority, he writes that "Great Society liberalism was defeated in large measure because of its association with consumerism." What we learn from this assessment is that Glickman may have been immersed in this topic for too many years.

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Also by Harold Meyerson:

A Battle of Wills

Countercyclical Capital

Keeper of the Liberal Flame

The Shipping Point

The Never-Ending Labor Wars

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Mrs. Palin, Quit Makin’ Things Up! « SHANNYN MOORE: JUST A GIRL FROM HOMER

Mrs. Palin, Quit Makin’ Things Up!

After I read Sarah Palin’s Facebook page response to the President’s speech on health care reform, I had to walk away and count to ten-in Russian. You may say, why bother? She’s not relevant. She’s the pin-up girl for crazies.

Last night, a man with a gun attempted entry into the Capital. Rep. Joe Wilson yells, “You Lie”, and teabaggers think it’s porn. The radical right, who celebrate the assassination of Dr. Tiller and protest their children hearing the encouraging words of a black president, LOVE Palin. She does nothing to denounce their idiocy, she revels in it. I write about her now because of who she represents — very dangerous people.

Here is her statement with my response.

SP–After all the rhetoric is put aside, one principle ran through President Obama’s speech tonight: that increased government involvement in health care can solve its problems.

SM–Nope, not what he said…so, to borrow a line from one of your fans, “You Lie!” Many suspect you did not write your Facebook response, but for argument’s sake, I will assume you did.

SP–Many Americans fundamentally disagree with this idea. We know from long experience that the creation of a massive new bureaucracy will not provide us with “more stability and security,” but just the opposite. It’s hard to believe the President when he says that this time he and his team of bureaucrats have finally figured out how to do things right if only we’ll take them at their word.

SM–Hmmm, reminds me of Homeland Security and cavity searches to get on a plane. Or illegally wiretapping Americans…or, yellow cake uranium and WMD, or…maybe you’re just projecting.

SP–Our objections to the Democrats’ health care proposals are not mere “bickering” or “games.” They are not an attempt to “score short term political points.” And it’s hard to listen to the President lecture us not to use “scare tactics” when in the next breath he says that “more will die” if his proposals do not pass.

SM–It is a sad fact that 14,000 people lose their health insurance every day in this country. Less coverage means less treatment means more people die…it’s simple math. In fact, an estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because they are uninsured. Scare tactics? That’s rich…I am a survivor of the Alaska Pageant circuit and if “scaring the be-Jesus out of old people” were a talent, you would’ve worn the crown. The President (remember, he won the election) basically called YOU a liar last night.

SP–In his speech the President directly responded to concerns I’ve raised about unelected bureaucrats being given power to make decisions affecting life or death health care matters. He called these concerns “bogus,” “irresponsible,” and “a lie” — so much for civility. After all the name-calling, though, what he did not do is respond to the arguments we’ve made, arguments even some of his own supporters have agreed have merit.

SM–First off, who’s “we”? Do you have a monkey in your pocket or are you referring to your ghostwriter? I’m quite sure President Obama didn’t respond simply because of you. Name calling? Like when you said, Obama was “Pallin’ around with terrorists”? Or, “he’s not like us”? You are an irresponsible liar and fear monger-President Obama was right. If you’re going to take credit for changing the conversation, then own the labels that you so richly deserve.

SP–In fact, after promising to “make sure that no government bureaucrat ….gets between you and the health care you need,” the President repeated his call for an Independent Medicare Advisory Council — an unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats charged with containing Medicare costs. He did not disavow his own statement that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost … the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives….” He did not disavow the statements of his health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, and continuing to pay his salary with taxpayer dollars proves a commitment to his beliefs. The President can keep making unsupported assertions, but until he directly responds to the arguments I’ve made, I’m going to call him out too.

SM–“Unelected, largely unaccountable group of bureaucrats” – like your ethics board? You, Madam, came between adequate care to Alaskans and their doctors with your negligence to those citizens who needed medical care. On your watch, ALASKANS DIED. If you want to call the President out on his policies, expect you will be called out as well. Why the hell should he “respond to the arguments” you’ve made? You’ve become a simple shill for the wealth-care industry.

SP–It was heartening to hear the President finally recognize that tort reform is an important part of any solution. But this concession shouldn’t lead us to take our eye off the ball: the Democrats’ proposals will not reduce costs, and they will not deliver better health care. It’s this kind of “healthy skepticism of government” that truly reflects a “concern and regard for the plight of others.” We can’t wait to hear the details on that; we look forward to working with you on tort reform.

SM–You haven’t come up with one idea on how to help people. As governor, you signed a bill that allowed the state to monitor and record every pharmaceutical taken by Alaskans. You, Madam, grew BIG GOVERNMENT and invaded the public’s privacy. On my radio show, I begged you to veto that bill. Your party is paid well to grease the wheels for industry…there’s a word for that-the merging of government and corporate interests…it’s called fascism. I know your supporters won’t understand the word, hell, at least one of them misspelled it on a t-shirt. Google it.

SP–Finally, President Obama delivered an offhand applause line tonight about the cost of the War on Terror. As we approach the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and honor those who died that day and those who have died since in the War on Terror, in order to secure our freedoms, we need to remember their sacrifices and not demonize them as having had too high a price tag.

SM–You have embarrassed Alaskans long enough. Stop it. My pop was moose hunting on 9/11. He didn’t even know it had happened for several weeks – but he knows Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even G.W. Bush admitted as much. Where were all the teabaggers on the Iraq War? Shame on you. How dare you. I don’t know what the daily worry of another terrorist attack is for Americans, but there is another terror that keeps at least 40 million minds busy. The terror that they, or one of their loved ones will become sick and they won’t have the money or insurance to have adequate treatment. You, Madam, don’t live in this state of fear, but it is real. Healthcare Reform is another war; a war against the corporations who make a profit from denying services.

SP–Remember, Mr. President, elected officials work for the people. Forcing a conclusion in order to claim a “victory” is not healthy for our country. We hear you say government isn’t always the answer; now hear us — that’s what we’ve been saying all along.

SM–Remember, MRS. Palin, you WERE an elected official. YOU QUIT! You’ve been saying the government isn’t always the answer…well, you certainly weren’t the answer. You proved that the wrong person at the helm is dangerous for the American people as well as the planet. “Forcing a conclusion in order to claim a “victory” is not healthy for our country.” NO KIDDING – does the banner “mission accomplished” ring any bells?

SP– Sarah Palin

SM–Thank you for not signing Governor…really, I mean it, thanks.

GOP Lawmaker's Graphic Sex-Bragging Caught On Tape | TPMMuckraker

There's no hypocrisy here at all. Republicans simply believe that they deserve a different standard than liberals, do. Republicans are part of the ruling class generally, you see, or at least believe they are, so when they misbehave, it's not a potential threat to society the way misbehavior by *those* people might be...

It's the equivalent of how, when someone is walking down the street with a traffic cone on their head, talking to themselves, you describe them as "eccentric" if they're rich and "crazy" if they're poor.

So when a liberal or Democrat cheats on his wife, it's "indicative of a pattern of immortality and dishonesty". When a Republican or conservative cheats on his wife, it's "an isolated, one-time-only moment of weakness for which Jesus has already accepted my heartfelt apology."

CAUGHT ON TAPE!!.....CA Assemblyman Michael Duvall; HOT MIC convo about sex 'a lot' and 'spanking'

Why We Need Government-Run Universal Socialized Health Insurance

Print: Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

 

Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

By Patricia J. Williams

This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.

August 26, 2009

If you are watching the healthcare town-hall ruckuses with only common dictionary meanings in your head, you will be struck by the protesters' general incoherence and outright nonsense, bearing no rational connection to the actual draft of the healthcare bill. As Representative Barney Frank demanded of one constituent who likened the bill to Nazism, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?"

But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal... then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

So reversal is key to understanding what's going on. It's not just "lies"; it's the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down. It's not factually accurate, but this is how they feel. Obama is Hitler! Health insurance for all means euthanasia for me! "My" country is suddenly "their" country.

Of course, there are special interests who profit from the magnification of these fears. Betsy McCaughey, a former shill for a medical instruments company, is the original source of the "death panel" rumors. From the beginning, big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, with an almost inconceivable amount of money to spend, have been muddying the waters. Think about the recent revelation that Merck secretly financed the publication of a fake medical journal that was designed to look objective but merely touted the supposed benefits of its products--and included "paid advertisements" for the company's drugs. What is truth in such a corrupt hall of mirrors?

But what does the bill actually say? A quick summary of the most contentious point: the act would provide reimbursement if you seek medical counseling about end-of-life decisions. This option allows you to plan what you would like to have done in the case of catastrophic or terminal illness--nothing forced about it. All extraordinary measures will continue to be used to resuscitate someone whose wishes are unknown: feeding tube, intubation, cracking ribs to defibrillate, whatever it takes. By contrast, it is private, profit-motivated insurance companies--which deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and restrict one's choice of doctor, medical treatments and length of hospital stays (based on actuarial tables)--that bear the greatest resemblance to a mulching euthanasia machine. When nearly 50 million US citizens live without any health coverage, how on earth could a purely voluntary public option be considered throwing people under the bus?

Let me acknowledge the genuine ideological and moral misgivings behind some of the protests. Many libertarians hate anything the government does, no matter how monopolistic or quasi-governmental the power of pharmaceutical and insurance companies. But they are a minority and not generally the bloc using the language of reversal and code. Similarly, there are those with genuine moral or religious qualms: "prolifers" who, if they believe that life begins at the molecular moment of conception, could also think that any end-of-life consultation is against God's will. This would be the same line of reasoning followed by those who wanted Congress to keep Terri Schiavo on life support no matter what. While I can certainly respect that as a belief, it is clearly even more of a minority position than libertarianism. In addition, it requires strong-armed government intrusion over the wishes of patients or family; and it is totally unsustainable as national public policy.

All of this is complicated but surely, with a bit of listening, comprehensible to the average citizen. So how do we connect the reality of our dismal life-expectancy and health-cost statistics to the hysterical sobbing of people who come to town-hall meetings furious that "the insurance companies won't be able to make a profit"? Much of the epic woe is not about healthcare or public options. It's about roiling resentments that need to be dressed up as something else, the coded mummery of Halloween monsters hybridized into new chimeras of hate. It's about fear that precious resources are being transferred to "alien" others. Fear that the gains of others are ill-gotten, leaving the lonely patriot survivalist as victim, "thrown away," trash. In these fiery monologues, even our president is figured as conspiratorially alien-birthed, from a galaxy far, far away, who's just pretending to be one of "us."

This morning I saw a picture of President Obama dressed as Hitler, complete with little mustache, tacked high on a tree trunk. At first it seemed jaw-droppingly ridiculous, sociopathically paranoid. But if the rule of reversal is what's encoded in that image, all people of good will must worry that what's really at stake for some of our gun-toting, demagogic fellow citizens is nothing less than America's very own Weimar moment.

About Patricia J. Williams

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor." Her books include The Rooster's Egg (1995), Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997) and, most recently, Open House: On Family Food, Friends, Piano Lessons and The Search for a Room of My Ow