SPECIAL COVERAGEI live-blogged the spontaneous Obama victory celebration in Washington DC.
Experience what it felt like to be among thousands of deliriously happy people gathered outside the White House. Click here.
Previously, I had been blogging about the Obama, McCain and the US election. I wrote about Sarah Palin on this blog even before McCain chose her to be his running mate. The choice was disappointing, and a possibility I had anticipated.
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JotUSA - SPECIAL USA COVERAGE
While searching for the polling data reported in this post, I came across a blog comment that relates to my own observation: that the public knows little about the Obama health care bill. Eliza Jane Dodd commented at Healthcare Now:
Why is the WHITE HOUSE AFRAID to TAKE a POLL or have a PETITION for HR676 Universal Health Care ? I know the Bill would Pass ! Every Single Person is Blown away [...] Never have Heard about itandwhen they read it they all ask: How do we get it and want it! I think something is very FISHY SMELLING in America’s White House. I have E-Mailed over 3,000 E-mails […] EVERYONE WANTS HR676 NOW!
Dodd's observations about the reaction of her countrymen after she tells them the specifics of HR-676 are not surprising if you consider the polling data. The polls show that American want that which happens to be in the bill. Of course, the White House has done more to advance the issue since Dodd's comment was posted in February -- but arguably not nearly enough.
Earlier in the month, I noted that "In domestic politics . . . Obama's inclination to play the "unity card" has tended to undermine the position of many of his supporters at the bargaining table to the advantage of his Republican opponents." Well, he's at it again. Krugman blogs:
My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.
And now he’s done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he’s willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?
There are two possibilities. Obama is 1) just a really lousy negotiator, or 2) not at all serious about achieving meaningful health care reform.
Given that it was Edwards who put health back on the Democrats' agenda, I am not convinced Obama is committed.
So where does big business likely stand with respect to health care reform? Pharmaceutical and banking industries can be expected to stand behind the insurance companies who stand the most to lose. Agriculture, of course, is the dominion of the petrochemical industries (fertilizer and pesticides); naturally, petrochem is going to be fully behind whatever big pharma wants: that's no real reform.
On the other hand, industries that employee lots of full-time workers who make things or provide services ought to favor reform. For example, military-industrials stands to gain from health care reform. That's because under the current system companies are saddled with paying for -- often expensive -- health insurance plans for their workers.
So does this mean that the oligarchs are split over health care?
Not exactly. The problem is that even industries that must pay the full burden of insuring workers have often been able to escape the burden of employer-financed health care by passing the costs along to their workers in the form of lower wages. So I don't imagine that the oligarchs are going to have a civil war among themselves over this particular issue.
The principle beneficiary of real health reform is middle-class America. The only question is whether the people still count in Washington.
There are other, less life-threatening, ways to try to make ends meet. The Associated Press has reported that more women from all social classes are resorting to stripping, although “gentlemen’s clubs,” too, have been hard-hit by the recession. The rural poor are turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.
And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wis., a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he’s supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver is doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
Ehrenreich observes: "Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, offers data showing that blue-collar unemployment is increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment."
Her sobering conclusion?
The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.
Blogging about the US "from an international perspective" sometimes all you can do is wonder in astonishment at the things Americans take for granted. I'm talking about that big stuff that makes sense to nobody who lives anywhere else in the world -- but seems to be an article of faith in the USA.
Why do Americans continue insist -- year after year -- that it is the responsibility of companies to fund the health insurance of employees? Why would a country that would hope to be competitive in the global marketplace saddle employers with health care costs -- especially when that same country champions free trade? Why would that country-- or any other -- perpetuate a system that effectively chains many workers to jobs they don't like; to jobs they keep just because they need the insurance, reducing productivity and happiness (supposedly one of the founding goals of the Republic!)
....His small company can't hope to compete with the benefits much larger companies can afford to offer their employees.
"Their premiums are dramatically lower than ours are," Guernsey said. "They have leverage over the health care industry to be able to drive their premiums down, and yet we have to be able to compete with those folks. So it increasingly becomes a major competitive issue for us."
On one hand, you gotta feel for these small business guys. On the other, you sit next to one of these guys the plane and he will tell you he always votes Republican because he "hates taxes." But do the Democrats deliver anything different? We shall soon learn the answer...
And there are those Americans who don't have a clue what is in their own self-interest. A woman described as "a real estate appraiser and a massage therapist" is quoted as saying:
"I personally don't have health insurance because it is too expensive," she said. "But I want to get for myself what I need. And I don't want to be told what I can have and when I can have it. And I sure as hell -- excuse me -- don't want the government having my medical records running throughout the United States."
Certainly when you hear a comments like that, you realize a lack of health insurance is the least of her problems. When did the brainwashing start? Notice the CNN article makes no effort to correct her many mistakes. Such reporting -- the quoting of one inaccuracy after another without comment -- may go a long way toward perpetuating the myths.
Andrew Sullivan explains the rationale for criminal prosecutions over the allegations of torture:
If the president believed that following the law at that point would lead to the imminent deaths of thousands of people, then his constitutional responsibility was either to urge the Congress to repeal the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention, or to break the law because this one moment necessitated it and then present himself for trial. That's the Lincoln model. What Bush did instead was secretly break the law, invoke a constitutional theory that the executive can always break such laws in the furtherance of national security and order his lawyers to provide specious reasons why he had not done so. Then he lied about it repeatedly in public. Then when photographs from Abu Ghraib showed in graphic detail the horrifying reality of much milder techniques than the ones he had explicitly authorized, he blamed low-level soldiers and allowed them to take the fall. Then, over a year after Abu Ghraib and four years after 9/11, he set up an elaborate, ongoing program to torture prisoners, replete with lawyers, doctors, professional torturers, and psychologists. Then, when the International Committee of the Red Cross gave him a report detailing what it described as unequivocal torture, he shelved it, further violating his core responsibility to enforce the law.
This is an ongoing, premeditated conspiracy to systematically break the law and violate treaty obligations.
These things Andrew mentions are just the things wealready know about. What else might prosecutors dig up?
After the SARS pandemic ended, people warned the US government to prepare for the next outbreak. One professor wrote:
It may take 18 months to build a stockpile of respirators and masks, so there is no time to lose. The American people’s faith in their government will be seriously undermined if, along with larger measures like school closings, it cannot provide effective face protection for its citizens during a deadly pandemic. Masks and respirators may be our main lines of defense during a pandemic.
One "moderate Republican" senator recently tried to cut federal spending on US pandemic preparedness according to this Wall Street Journal article of Feb 5, 2009:
After meeting with Mr. Obama, Sen. Collins expressed concern about a number of spending provisions, including $780 million for pandemic-flu preparedness. "I have no doubt that the president is willing to negotiate in good faith, that he wants to have a bipartisan bill," Sen. Collins said.
Republicans have poured over $1 trillion dollars into a War on Terror with little debate, but won't spend even %0.1 of that figure on preventing deaths in a flu pandemic? That's nuts.
A major pandemic is probably no less likely than a major terrorist attack. A pandemic has the potential to kill more people. In fact, the only way a terror attack could kill as many Americans as a pandemic would be if the terrorists' weapon of choice caused a pandemic!
A CNN reporter attempts to ask a protester some questions, and gets heckled by members of a Republican "tea party" held in Chicago last Thursday. The protesters claimed CNN was "pro-Obama."
The major difference between the networks is that from the perspective of Americans on the center-left of the political spectrum -- a majority of the US voters in the last election -- Fox plays "bad cop" to CNN's "good-cop."
Fox actually helped organize the turn-out for the Conservative movement's "tea parties" held across the US last week. By targeting CNN as "biased" right wing-groups help the networks to frame the national debate in a way that is safe for corporate America. One way to do this is to convince enough people that Obama and even CNN are on the extreme left.
By and large, Obama continues to govern from the right, pushing policies that are generous to the corrupt banking industry. His administration has actively defended the Bush Administration's efforts to spy on American citizens, committed itself to sending more troops to Afghanistan in the name of fighting the guys who attacked America eight years ago, and suggested that CIA officials accused of war crimes ought not be brought to trial.
Nevertheless, both CNN and Fox both give disporportionate weight to criticisms of Obama coming from the right.
As the right of the Republican Party has governed the US for most of the past eight years, many the most substantial criticisms of Obama come from the left. The right wing movement -- with its one-policy call for "lower taxes" -- has a modest aim at this point. That is, to distract Americans from backing solutions that could change the power structure. Captains of key industries do not want the Obama Administration to make fundamental changes concerning the economy, finance, health care, and foreign policy (defense). Even reforms that could make life better for ordinary Americans, and put the economy and environment on a sure-footing, are anathema to the oligarchs.
When Chinese, Japanese, Africans, or Cambodians do it America calls it a "war crime." When Americans do it, Obama calls it:
“time for reflection, not retribution.”
To Obama's credit, he was letting the lower-ranking CIA guys off the hook when he said that today, not upper level officials in the Bush administration. The best news of all was that Obama did not stand in the way of the planned release of torture memos. A NY Times report on the release states:
An early review suggested that the administration had declassified the vast bulk of the memos’ contents, a defeat for C.I.A. officials who had argued that such a step could be harmful to national security. The documents included Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 authorizing the C.I.A. to employ a number of aggressive techniques — including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and “waterboarding,” the near-drowning technique.
To remind ourselves at what's at stake with respect to these memos, let's watch journalist Hitch undergo what the NY Times refers to as an "aggressive technique":
Christopher Hitchens also wrote about the experience of being water-boarded in Vanity Fair.
In Newsweek Zakarai explains why Canada appears better positioned than Canada to weather the present financial crisis:
Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn't grown in size; the others have all shrunk.
From banking regulations, to immigration, to health care, it sure looks as if Americans could stand to learn a few pointers from their neighbors to the north.
They [the Republicans] want more tax cuts and more real stimulus -- stuff that will create jobs now. Not some pie in the sky proposal that may pay dividends years down the road. And they're right.
That's certainly not how economist Krugman has described the Republican proposals:
Thirty-six out of 41 Republican Senators voted for the proposed DeMint amendment to the stimulus bill — a massive package of permanent tax cuts that would create a huge hole in the budget, while doing very little to help the economy.
There isn’t much room for bipartisanship when 87.8% of the other party is totally irresponsible.
Joe the Plumber, now a correspondent for Pajama's TV based in Israel says:
"I think media should be abolished from, you know, reporting," Wurzelbacher said. "You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'well, look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."
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Jot USA is the companion blog to JOTMAN.COM, winner of the "Reporters Without Borders Award" in 2007.
