Anti-war protesters demonstrate in Times Square October 7, 2001 in New York City. Thousands of marchers participated in the rally on the same day that the US and Britain commenced air strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. [Huffington Post caption]
It could have gone much differently.
I was in the streets eight years ago today, but with a characteristic mid-western idealism continually renewed without any justification, I didn’t believe we were actually going to war. It was just so stupid and wrong, so eighteenth century.
Today some of us mourn the eight years (and still counting) of the wars without end begun by George W. Bush and embraced by Barack Hussein Obama.
They are all Obama’s wars.
Woodrow Wilson’s war, announced as the “war to end all wars”, lasted 19 months. Our participation in the Second World War lasted a little over three years and eight months. Our current series of insane, counter-intuitive, self-destructive, illegitimate, racist, imperial, immoral, and finally perpetually self-propagating wars, waged under the rubric, “Operation Enduring Freedom“, have been programmed from the very beginning to go on forever.
[image, otherwise uncredited, from Huffington Post]
Category: Politics
Obama addresses UN; we watch “Save the Green Planet”
spotted as I left MoMA yesterday afternoon: the Presidential truck speeding east on 53rd Street with the Obama party securely ensconced, heading back to the Waldorf from the David Letterman taping
At the UN climate summit today, Obama told the General Assembly that the U.S. is “determined to act” on climate change. Last night at home, in an unplanned salute to the summit, Barry and I watched “Save the Green Planet“.
Right now I’m thinking that while we were enjoying that film we probably contributed as much toward toward averting the worst fate of the earth as anything promised by our President.
That just doesn’t make me feel so good, so I hope I’m wrong.
We’ve been on a Korean film binge lately, all knockouts, and most by the director Bong Joon-ho. Although we were unprepared for the violence in Joon-Hwan Jang’s hybrid comedy/drama/horror/sci-fi/thriller, we ended up watching most of the DVD’s long list of extra features and I still have “Jigureul jikyeora!” rolling around inside my head.
the real lie in Obama’s health care speech
Leonid Osipovic Pasternak The Night before the Exam 1935
let them finally offer care to everyone
I’m old enough to remember a little bit about the fuss over Harry Truman’s National Health Insurance initiative in the early post-war years, a part of what he called his “Fair Deal”. What would eventually become known as the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill (say it out loud, fast, but with respect) was first introduced in May, 1945. It was a proposal to expand the Social Security System into a full federal pension system and would have ultimately introduced single-payer health care. Universal health care had been a dream of progressives ever since the beginning of the century and more recently outlined in 1938 by an interdepartmental presidential committee formed in 1935 by FDR. While each of the exhausted European nations succeeded in enacting such programs shortly after 1945, it never went anywhere in the U.S., the only warring nation which had come out of the conflict stronger and wealthier than it had entered it.
All of which brings me to say that Obama did lie in his speech* last night, although not when he denied his plan would include health care for illegal immigrants [but what a crazy idea that would be, huh?].
Rather, he lied (okay he said something false) when he spoke about the public option, the last scrap remaining from a great and venerable reform movement, warning progressives not to insist on it:
It is only one part of my plan, and should not be used as a handy excuse for the usual Washington ideological battles. To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades, the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage affordable for those without it [my emphasis]. The public option is only a means to that end – and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.
in fact, the “driving idea” was never about ending “insurance company abuses and making coverage affordable”. It was always about a single payer system providing health care for all. For the reality-based people it’s still about single payer, whether our President or our two corporationist parties like it or not.
*
I cannot lie: I actually never intended to watch Obama’s speech and in fact I did not; instead, while looking on line this morning, trying to find anyone who was not dazzled by its supposed brilliance and its putative success (what does “success” mean in this context?), I came upon this post by Cenk Uygur, where I found the segment from Obama’s delivery which I excerpted above.
[image from Bridgeman]
Obama is a disaster for the hopes of real progressives
Roy Lichtenstein Hopeless 1963
Obama is a disaster, and I say that because his failure may mean that the kind of reform which could have saved America may never be possible again.
His time appears to have run out (I’m not sure he would be interested in doing anything with it even if he were given an extension). He has utterly failed to do what he said he would do, what his supporters voted for him to do. His election, following the disastrous failure of his predecessor, and coinciding with that of a Democratic House and Senate, created an extraordinary momentum and an extremely rare political opportunity for advancing a progressive agenda. It was an environment, a moment, which we’re unlikely ever to see again. In the six months since we’ve witnessed the shocking success of the scurvy machinations devised by a radical Right which had been reported displaced and in serious disarray. They’ve given us an indication of what to expect going forward.
Our politics are a complete fraud: Any principled engagement in politics has become an absolutely futile exercise and this will remain the case unless we are able to take the system out of the hands of the plutocrats and the corporations that own it. I see no possibility of that happening.
If such a possibility were moral, or even real, I would be tempted to adopt a status of “inner emigration”*. I can say at least that I no longer argue with any American who says they don’t vote; a decision not to go through the motions which might help legitimize a fake democracy appears to be pretty reasonable in the circumstances of the present.
Although I had started to worry about the future of Obama’s “change” myth as early as late last November (see this entry), I held off publishing a more definitive list of complaints until now, finally deciding to pull it out of the “drawer” where I keep my drafts, because I just couldn’t stand looking at the subject line any longer.
In a post written only days after the election I expressed my reservations about whether Obama would be able to pull off the revolution that it would take to undue the damage which Bush administration had done, but I concluded that I believed he really would pull it off.
I was wrong. While I could turn out to be wrong again and would welcome it, today I feel certain that he won’t be able to pull off any reform and, looking at what David Sirota has called his Team of Corporate Zombies and checking off the list of the things he has done and the things he has not done, I have some real doubts about whether he ever intended to.**
For months I’ve been talking to friends about my despair over Obama’s administration, challenging anyone to point to anything which it has actually accomplished. At first most people seemed shocked by my criticism, but if they gave me any argument it would usually only be a comment about something Obama has said he would do. I’ve not been registering any shocked responses in recent weeks, and I’m hearing no arguments, so while this post’s downbeat argument might have really stood out earlier, maybe its novelty has been overtaken by events.
But I still think it’s worth taking stock of what we have lost, so here’s a partial list:
1. The Patriot Act remains almost intact
2. “State secrets” remain state secrets, and the administration argues that the privilege is rooted in the Constitution
3. The prisoners in Guantanamo, even if it the concentration camp is decommissioned, will remain prisoners; they and anyone our government rounds up in the future can be “detained” indefinitely, without charge or trial
3. The administration refuses to release prisoner abuse photos from years ago
4. The policy of rendition will continue
5. We now have an accelerated war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and our troops remain in Iraq
6. The administration shows no interest in addressing ENDA
7. Obama’s Justice Department has argued that the state has an interest in defending marriage as meaning a contract between a man and a woman
8. The administration shows no interest in addressing “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” (service people are still being discharged for being gay)
9. Addressing climate change appears to be a low priority (and coal is still being extracted through mountain-top removal)
10. Universal health care is off the table, opening the way for even more complicated for-profit systems which won’t even address rising costs
11. Recognition of needle exchange programs is going nowhere
12. Financial regulatory reform, where it is alive, has been put in the hands of Wall Street insiders
13. The measures used to address the economic meltdown and bank failures, the stimulus and the bailout, were designed by and for the individuals and banks who were responsible for the Great Recession in the first place, and have neglected foreclosures, loss of home equity value, and unemployment (and underemployment)
14. No back-to-work program which might be aimed at greening American technology
15. Continued neglect of the infrastructure
16. Continued neglect of meaningful public transit programs
17. The ill-conceived and obscenely wasteful “Clunkers” program and the distraction from real, constructive change which it presented
18. Failure to reinstate the ban on assault weapons
19. “Flexibility” on the call for a halt to the illegal Israeli settlements on the Left Bank
20. Maintaining Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search (without suspicion of wrongdoing) traveler’s laptops, cellphones, or other electronic devices
21. Obama’s vaunted “Transparency” has become a joke
22. Maintaining the FISA spying-on-citizens protocols
23. Extending a free pass to Bush, Cheney and Rice for their clear violations of the Geneva Conventions
24. Expanding both the scope and power of the “faith-based” initiatives introduced by the Bush White House [added to the list Sept. 8]
ADDENDA (post-publication):
25 And now (revealed September 15) asking Congress to in fact extend three key provisions of the Patriot Act, which would otherwise expire at the end of the year
26. Unlike the last four presidents, Obama has not replaced the prior administration’s district attorneys wholesale, but has instead left in place “the majority of the Bush administration DA’s who had survived Rove’s purges intended to make sure they were loyal Republican apparatchiks” [quoted from Ian Welsh], an alarming realization for anyone whose politics are to the Left of Attila the Hun
27. [the words of Ian Welsh once again:] “Obama has not cleaned out the administration in general of Bush-era appointees and plants; indeed he has filled less spots than either Clinton or Bush II had by this point in their terms–and no, it’s not because the Senate won’t confirm them.”
28. The despicable private army formerly known as Blackwater remains in Iraq today, and the Obama administration recently extended the company’s contract there indefinitely; the firm, whose owner has styled himself a Christian crusader, also has contracts in Aghanistan
29. Once again employing the argument of “National security”, the administration is trying to weaken the “media shield” bill, designed to protect reporters against being forced to testify, which is currently working its way through Congress
One wonders just what have they been doing since moving into the White House, besides worrying about how not to offend their political enemies. Did everyone else notice that Van Jones, the man Obama threw to the dogs late Saturday night (an interesting news-hour calculation for the announcement), was one of the only genuine progressives in the White House, a real community organizer (like POTUS, before he got religion) and not a political hack like everyone else, including, I now believe, the boss?
*
Innere Emigration describes the the choice of some intellectuals, certain artists and writers, to remain in Germany (and, after the 1938 Anschluss, in Austria) during the era of National Socialism, although they were in opposition to the Nazi regime. It assumed a complete withdrawal from public life.
**
I notice that last November I included a footnote saying that in the end his race had proved to be no barrier to Obama’s achievement of the White House; today, if I weren’t in despair of Obama’s competence or even his commitment, I could easily add a footnote about the fact that from the beginning race has however proven to be behind his opponents’ mindless campaigns against every policy he has proposed: It’s almost all about that uppity negro.
[image of Lichtenstein’s “Hopelesss” from theheretik]
Port Authority strews 9/11 junk around the country
Dennis Klingensmith of Prospect Hill Cemetery in York, Pa., prepares to haul away a beam that will become part of a memorial. Recipients of the wreckage pay for transporting it. – NYTimes caption
Ludicrous or baleful? The Port Authority is giving away WTC junk (in both senses) more or less in our name.
As the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, approaches on Friday, pieces of the World Trade Center rubble from that day have never been more accessible. A new campaign is under way to speed up the process and increase the volume of giving away pieces of steel big and small from the debris.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the steel, will invite police and fire departments and mayors and other leaders of cities and towns throughout the country to ask for pieces for memorials.
When I looked at the article on the front page of the NYTimes this morning my first response was, “this is still going on? I’d thought we were over that, especially considering how well our response to 9/11 had gone.” I turned to Barry and said, “we’re going to have jingoistic shrines made of crushed ambulances and twisted steel columns in every town in the country – in perpetuity”, and he added, “to remind us that Saddam Hussein will not get away with it, and that the fight for cheap oil will never end”.
[image by Michael Nagle from The New York Times]
Medicare for all: it’s just, and it works
In a functioning community, “I’ve got mine” is not the beginning and the end of civic responsibility.
When did the discussion of promoting public health degenerate into a discussion about promoting the health of private insurance companies?
I’m hoping that we’re going to find out soon that there aren’t enough votes to pass a health-care bill either with or without the “pubic option”, and that Congress will then have the courage and good sense to produce the only solution which would serve people rather than corporations: Single payer. I know it sounds crazy, but it could actually happen, and the insane mechanisms being tossed around right now really are crazy.
Medicare for all: It’s the only rational and ethical solution, both for delivering health care and for controlling its costs. It’s our selfishness which has always been behind our horror of “socialism” (and from our beginnings as a people, our distrust of any government). It’s time to just get over it. Were it not for those fears, fanned on the subject of health care by the insurance corporations which have owned the discussion for longer than anyone alive today can remember, we’d have already been living with its benefits and its savings for half a century, perhaps longer.
ADDENDUM: Obama doesn’t seem to be a part of the process these days, and perhaps he never was, but for what it’s worth, the man we now address as Mr. President once favored a single-payer system. In his post on creators.com, “Health Care’s Enigma-In-Chief“, David Sirota reminds us of a speech Obama delivered at the AFL-CIO Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Conference in 2003:
[He] declared himself “a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program” — i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by having government finance health care. Obama’s position was as controversial then as today — which is to say, controversial among political elites, but not among the general public. ABC’s 2003 poll showed almost two thirds of Americans desiring a single-payer system “run by the government and financed by taxpayers,” just like CBS’s 2009 poll shows roughly the same percentage today.
In that speech six years ago, Obama said the only reason single-payer proponents should tolerate delay is “because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”
[image from education-portal]
“The real US healthcare issue: compassion deficiency”
we can’t do it with bake sales
Gordon Marino’s short piece, “The real US healthcare issue: compassion deficiency“, should be the first and the last word on the subject of health care. These are just excerpts:
The healthcare debate has revealed that Americans suffer from a compassion deficiency. Many of us would prefer that our fellow citizens go without medical care rather than make even the slightest of sacrifices.
. . . . Apparently, there are a lot of folks who would choose to have young mothers with cancer go without chemotherapy, instead of giving up a bit of that disposable income that is our badge of freedom and individualism.
Sure, we all like to think that as Americans we care, but normally we’ll only bother to help when someone’s tragedy manages to really touch us – a loved one perhaps, or a subject in a media drama – but it’s not enough, and it’s not about ethics. Marino continues:
I reside in a small town and every week there is some kind of raffle or spaghetti dinner to scrounge together the funds to meet the medical expenses of a child with leukemia or a teenager with a brain tumor. We’re trying to pay for brain surgery with bake sales!
“The real US healthcare issue” had been published in the Christian Science Monitor exactly one week back, but I first saw it a few minutes ago when Barry sent me an IM pointing to what I have to describe as a pretty exciting new social bookmarking site for philosophers*, “Sympose“. It describes itself as “a fast and easy way for professional philosophers to find online philosophy content that they might enjoy”. While content can be supplied only by philosophers who have earned their Ph.D. or persons who are enrolled in a graduate program in philosophy, at least the rest of us can swim around in all that heady wisdom.
Gordon Marino is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf’s College, and the item was “scooped” onto Sympose by Preston Werner.
*
Disclosure, or confession: Back in the early dark ages (way before the internet), one of my undergraduate minors was philosophy. Okay, the other was German, but my history major was supposed to be the practical subject.
[image from trinityhawaii]
Whole Foods’ John Mackey wants us unwholesome
I’d love to find some excuse to continue shopping at Whole Foods, but I just couldn’t live with myself if I went with anything I can come up with.
I am a serious cook, I make a real dinner for Barry and myself virtually every night, sometimes including friends as well, and I take my food sources very seriously. I was delighted to learn around nine years ago that a branch of Whole Foods was going to be opening at the end of our block. We already had Garden of Eden on 23rd Street, about the same distance away, and I could easily visit the Union Square Greenmarket, Citarella in the VIllage, Balducci’s on 14th Street and Buon Italia and the other shops in Chelsea Market. I could reach just as many more good food outlets if I ventured a little further, and I often did.
I immediately found Whole Foods very convenient, and I had a certain amount of confidence in the quality of what they sold, perhaps buying too much into its own hype and the excitement of its fans. The store became a very big part of my hunting and gathering activities. I soon began to think of the store as almost indispensable. It didn’t hurt that since it was only a few hundred feet from our apartment I could walk out my door at 9 in the evening or even later, having no idea of what I was going to buy, and still get back in time to make a proper dinner for the two of us.
But Whole Foods has been out of my life since last Thursday (except in the telling of this story). I’m going to have to make some adjustments and I’m definitely going to be planning ahead from now on. I regret having to make the adjustment, but I may be more disturbed about the fact that it took me too long to get to this point.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that for a long time I found it convenient to ignore what I began to hear early on about the Whole Foods management preventing its employees from unionizing (I did not then know the extent of its larger political involvement fighting the union movement, including opposing the Employee Free Choice Act). And then late last week the news broke about co-founder, Chairman and CEO John Mackey’s Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed on health care, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare“. I could no longer ignore the fact that my money was supporting reactionary politics (the agent of the transaction was boldly broadcasting it to the world). Mackey opened his odd, obsessional piece with an ignorant, plainly specious quote* from scary Margaret Thatcher, and went on to argue against President Obama’s health reform proposals. In fact he railed against any government involvement in the regulation of health care, positing instead eight of his own ideas for reform.
My favorite:
Revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
From its beginnings this food chain, anointed (with some justification) as more wholesome than any of its competitors, has assiduously cultivated an image of social responsibility. But it’s an image which is, at the very least, at odds with much of its social and political conduct, especially because of the activities of the increasingly-eccentric John Mackey. The long arm (money, power, influence) of this very successful, wealthy corporation now manages to touch the lives of everyone, even those who have never entered one of its stores.
Even if the expected (and already dramatic) negative reaction of Whole Foods customers to the revelation of Mr. Mackey’s Right-wing adventures isn’t enough to frighten the corporation’s investors, I would be surprised if they haven’t already started to question his judgment, his ability to perform his job. Any competent CEO is well-advised to avoid political activities which offend and damage the best interests of his firm’s clients and customers – or at least avoid being discovered or outed as an extremist nut.
I’m not going to pretend that my decision to no longer darken the threshold of the Chelsea Whole Foods outlet is of much consequence in the grand scheme of things, but I know I’m not alone in wanting to see John Mackey relieved of his duties. Stranger things have happened, and corporations are not known for courage, or preferring stupidity over the bottom line.
Should he be removed, John Mackey, the free market libertarian, should be able to appreciate the irony of the marketplace deciding that it had to be.
*
“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out
of other people’s money.”
[image from gezellig-girl’s Flickr photostream]
Obama drops the other shoe: ‘Public Option’ dead
indeed
The NYTimes headline this morning reads, “‘PUBLIC OPTION’ IN HEALTH CARE MAY BE DROPPED“. It’s no news to my friends that I had already dropped Obama as a “public option” some time ago, but I have to admit that the latest revelation of our wimpy President’s true nature was still a shock.
First we were told that single-payer, the only rational approach to furnishing health care for all, was off the table; now we’ve been told that the public option has apparently also been jettisoned. It’s been done in order to pass a bill which would be almost worthless, but one which would have the support of Obama’s real constituency, the rich, the corporations and the Congress they’ve all paid for.
The public option was the only element within the complex of prolix, jury-rigged texts being knocked together in the House and Senate back rooms which could actually have delivered both the cost savings and universal coverage which were the whole point of the health care reform we voted for last year and which an overwhelming percentage of the (in-the-flesh) population supports today.
The fact that the conversation has been transformed into a discussion of how to provide universal coverage for the health of the insurance companies, might be ironic if it wasn’t just plain “sick”.
[image from bookmice]
old media and the Iran crisis
The Iranian protest movement is using social media in innovative ways to organize and get their message across. In this June 9 photo, a supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi films an election rally. – Spiegel Online
The exigencies of the continuing crisis in Iran have eclipsed the importance of traditional media institutions virtually overnight.
Because of a frightened theocracy’s police controls and its effectiveness in blocking both access to and the filing of news, the role for television, radio and newspaper news reporting during the unraveling of one of the most important stories of the decade has fallen into a new category: In the telling of the story the traditional news organizations now occupy a middle position, in time and distance, somewhere between actual news reporting and what we will eventually find in the accounts of historians.
We have all become the reporters, in a gradual development whose significance is made clear and dramatic in the way in which we are learning about what is going on in the streets and homes of Iran this month, where it is new media which is keeping a popular revolution alive. Long live new media!
The impotence of old media may look like merely the consequence of a single emergency, but at the moment it’s an emergency without a denouement. Also, because there are certain to be others like it, and because our social media tools are only going to become more accessible and more ubiquitous, it’s looking like an impotence from which it may never completely emerge.
Together with the many past and continuing criminal failures of our news establishments and my excitement in watching the human and technological drama of a growing popular role in creating and reporting the news, I have to balance my treasuring a modest early experience in print journalism and my enduring pleasure in reading the best work of journalists published in hard copy. For that reason I have complex feelings while watching what may be the imminent demise of these hoary, once-great institutions which are already-so distressed: It’s pretty sad, and I confess to feeling embarrassed for all of us when I read postings, on the BBC, the New York Times or the Guardian sites for instance, apologizing for not being able to get a story from their own reporters and camera crews.
The television, radio and print news media may soon be left with merely a secondary role (if any) sifting, analyzing and commenting on information provided by outside and structurally independent reporters on the scene who are using the latest personal technology.
[image caption and otherwise uncredited image from Spiegel]