Contrary viewpoints -- Part 2: More on Whole Foods

Michael Pollan, the great food writer, publicly stated his opposition to the boycott of Whole Foods. Not that he agrees with the company's CEO, John Mackey on healthcare, he just believes that the good the company does in improving Americans' diets is too important to jeopardize:

John Mackey’s views on health care, much as I disagree with them, will not prevent me from shopping at Whole Foods. I can understand why people would want to boycott, but it’s important to play out the hypothetical consequences of a successful boycott. Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer. I happen to believe health care reform has the potential to drive big changes in the food system, and to enlist the health care industry in the fight to reform agriculture. How? Because if health insurers can no longer pick and choose their clients, and throw sick people out, they will develop a much stronger interest in prevention, which is to say, in changing the way America feeds itself. When health insurers realize they will make thousands more in profits for every case of type II diabetes they can prevent, they will develop a strong interest in things like corn subsidies, local food systems, farmer’s markets, school lunch, public health campaigns about soda, etc. So Mackey is wrong on health care, but Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder. I haven’t examined the political views of all the retailers who feed me, but I can imagine having a lot of eating problems if I make them a litmus test.

There is something to this, I guess, though I think he's missing the potential use of the Whole Foods question as an organizing focal point. But I respect his reasoning, given the difficulty of balancing his two beliefs.

Contrary viewpoints -- Part 1 On Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

I have some links to pass along today, progressives/liberals taking a slightly different approach to some of the issues in the news:


Part 1 on Ted Kennedy, in which Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer, takes on the Kennedy myth and reminds us that deregulation was a very bipartisan affair

Henwood, in his blog, stands as the scold in the room, taking on Kennedy from the left in a way that was all too absent during the week's coverage of his death. Kennedy was an interesting character -- personal flaws, old-fashioned liberalism, etc., and the occasional contradiction. Kennedy -- "soul" of the Democrats, friend of the common man, Liberal Lion (and yes I know I trafficked in some of this last week) -- was also a significant player in the late-1970s push for deregulation.

Often, we talk about the Reagan years when discussion deregulation but the reality is that Carter and the Democrats got the ball rolling.

Once upon a time, working for an airline or driving a truck was a pretty good way to make a living without an advanced degree: union jobs with high pay and decent benefits. A major reason for that is that both industries were federally regulated, with competition kept to a minimum. Starting in the early 1970s, an odd coalition of right-wingers, mainstream economists, liberals, and consumer advocates (including Ralph Nader) began agitating for the deregulation of these industries. All agreed that competition would bring down prices and improve service.

Among the leading agitators was Teddy Kennedy. The right has been noting this in their memorials for “The Lion,” but not the weepy left.

Why was Kennedy such a passionate deregulator? Greg Tarpinian, former director of the Labor Research Association who went on to work for Baby Jimmy Hoffa, once speculated to me that it was because merchant capital always wants to reduce transport costs—the merchant in question being Teddy’s father,
Bootlegger Joe. Maybe.

In any case, Kennedy surrounded himself with aides who worked on drafting the deregulatory legislation. Many of them subsequently went on to work for Frank Lorenzo, the ghoulish executive who busted unions at Continental and Eastern airlines in the early 1980s. (Kennedy’s long-time ad agency also did PR work for Lorenzo.)

And what was the result of all this deregulation? Massive downward mobility for workers.

I'd forgotten this connection (not the Democrats' role, just the Kennedy role) and I suspect -- given Nader's involvement -- that the issues were actually the Teamsters, the antipathy that both the New Left and the Kennedy family had for Hoffa and his union, and the growing consumer advocacy movement.

The federal takeover of the Teamsters, I think, shows that they were right to be wary of the union's power. But the focus on consumers to the exclusion of nearly all else was foolish, as history shows; the assumption that opening these industries to an unfettered market would lower prices and cause no pain was not based in reality. Someone ultimately had to pay the cost of those lowered prices -- otherwise the lost revenue would have resulted in lost profit. And it was obvious that it wasn't going to be the CEOs.

'Yes, Virginia, the insurance companies do ration'

David Sirota caught something in today's edition of The New York Times that backs up what those of us supporting single-payer healthcare have been saying for years: Private insurers ration care.

Here is a quotation from Cheryl Tidwell, 45, director of commercial sales training for Humana, the "country's fourth-largtest insurer":

“We believe there’s a better way to control costs by controlling utilization and getting people involved in their health care.”

Translation: We control costs by controlling access, by deciding what will be covered and what will not be. In a word: Rationing.

As Sirota points out, "we're supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don't ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do - but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that's just not the case."

The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to "control utilization" - that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are "controlled" (read: prevented) from getting it.

As I said in a recent post, anyone who thinks rationing will not be a part of a future healthcare system, whether administered publicly or privately, is fooling themselves. Triage is part of medicine -- doctors make decisions every day based on need and effectiveness.

The difference is that private insurers make their decisions based on profit, while a public entity -- at least in theory -- would make its decisions based on the good of the patient and the good of society.

Free-marketers like to extol the virtues of the market, but the market -- because it is profit-based -- just doesn't function well with these kinds of life-and-death questions. Insurance companies make their money, after all, by paying out less money than they take in -- which creates a perverse disincentive. Remove the disincentive and maybe, just maybe, the healthcare system will start to behave in a more humane and rational manner.

Behind the 8 ball because of bailouts

Robert Johnson -- not the blues singer -- makes a compelling case that the failure of the Obama administration to stand up to the banks and Wall Streeters in the administration's earliest months is costing him dearly now, as he tries to pass major healthcare legislation and could cost him greatly down the road.

He writes that the bailout of the financial sector, a bailout that lacked any strings, may have "made sense in isolation," but lacked "an awareness of the historic context and opportunity" that called out for bolder action.

Free markets had profoundly failed. Government had been given another chance by the electorate that was inspired by candidate Obama. A chance to do some good
for the general interest and regain the reputation of a productive public sector after thirty years of disparagement. Yet by refusing to stand up to the oligarchs and set proper boundaries in defense of society, they fed the cynics and dissipated the magic that Obama had created for real change. The Administration seemed closer to Jamie (Dimon) and Goldman Sachs than to us. The lesson: if you fail to defend society once, people lose faith. The loss of faith carries a high price, and we're paying that price now in the arena of healthcare reform.

The point is, Johnson says, that we are in times of "great danger"; the Obama administration needs to act decisively or risk losing the moment.

Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

It is still early, of course, but we already are witnessing the seeds of a new narrative being born, with elections in Virginia and New Jersey that are turning on state issues being recast by the national media as referenda on the president. This is absurd, of course. The New Jersey vote will be about Gov. Jon Corzine and not about the president, who remains popular here.

But Obama's decision to buy into the financial status quo -- Summers, Geithner and Bernanke -- and his raising of bipartisanship above policy on healthcare and the stimulus (not to mention his selling out of workers on card check and the auto bailout) are making it that much harder to generate the kind of change we thought we could believe in.

Whole Foods hit by protests

Protesters are targeting Whole Foods because of comments made by company CEO John Mackey made in an op-ed in the Walls Street Journal earlier this month.

At first, the protests seemed unlikely to have much effect, unlikely to shift the debate much. In fact, there was the very real possibility that they could backfire.

But Whole Foods now appears to be the poster company in the current healthcare debate and, especially because the company's reputation (upscale progressivism) is belied by its aggressive anti-unionism, Mackey's comments could be creating the kind of momentum that has been lacking on the left side of the discussion.

Here is what Mackey had to say:

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.

Someone should tell Mackey that the markets for food and shelter have massive flaws, that there are thousands -- possibly millions -- of hungry and homeless Americans and that food prices have been outpacing inflation for quite some time.

As World War II was winding down, Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled a new "Economic Bill of Rights" that included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

Roosevelt said "these rights spell security" and would help move the nation toward "new goals of human happiness and well-being." William Greider, in his new book Come Home, America (excerpted in May 6 edition of The Nation), described Roosevelt's "Bill of Rights" as setting the agenda for the three decades that followed.

One important condition government can provide is the platform of "essential needs" that will give everyone more security and therefore more confidence to explore new and different choices. We could dust off Roosevelt's "second Bill of Rights" and address its unmet goals. FDR recognized in early 1944 that Americans were weary of the sacrifices imposed by World War II and so he announced a broadly conceived promise. After the war is won, he said, the country must construct a new set of meaningful "rights" for all, everything from health and education to work with remunerative wages. His vision of the future became the postwar political agenda of the Democrats, and in large measure the promises were kept.

Greider says we are at a point in history where we need to return to Roosevelt's construct and expand upon it -- to finish what FDR started.

Which brings me back to health care and the market. Roosevelt, basically, was saying was that there are some things in life that are too important to be left to the market. Health care is one of those things.

That's why I believe we need a single-payer healthcare system, one in which the federal government -- or some independent agency created by the feds -- acts as the funder of all care, with doctors and hospitals remaining independent. Care would be up to medical personnel without interference from insurance companies.

I won't pretend that such a change won't have its difficulties -- but the reorganization of the system would be an improvement on what we currently deal with. Critics of reform raise the specter of tax hikes and rationing, but we're already paying through the nose and having our care rationed -- but instead of a rationing by triage, with decisions made based on effectiveness and need, the insurance companies base their decisions on profit and profit alone.

Mackey's belief in the market probably wouldn't have triggered such disdain, however, had he not also blamed the victim in the healthcare fiasco. He said that "many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted," blaming the rising costs on obesity and diseases that he says "are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices." Making better lifestyle choices would help stem rising prices.

There is nothing wrong with better choices, but the issue here isn't McDonald's hamburgers and Krispy Kreme donoughts. It's access and cost and it is offensive to say that the people who are forced to use emergency rooms for primary care have brought it on themselves.

Hence, the protests, which are a direct response to the callousness of Mackey's piece and a desire, a need, to put single-payer on the table.

Runner's diary, Thursday

I stayed inside today and hit the weights pretty hard before getting on the treadmill for three miles. The weight work was good and needed. The treadmill tough -- I almost didn't go to the gym because my legs hurt when I woke up. But I did and I have to say I am glad.

iTunes: The Black Crowes, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

The last person I expected to record a Christmas record

I'd been hearing that this was going to come out, but really wasn't sure what to say about it. I'm still not sure -- a Bob Dylan Christmas album featuring him singing such happy tunes as “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Little Drummer Boy” and “Must Be Santa.”

What to say?

The album is a charity project -- as his release says,

All of the artist’s U.S. royalties from sales of these recordings will be donated to Feeding America, guaranteeing that more than four million meals will be provided to more than 1.4 million people in need in this country during this year’s holiday season. Bob Dylan is also donating all of his future U.S. royalties from this album to Feeding America in perpetuity.

Additionally, the artist is partnering with two international charities to provide meals during the holidays for millions in need in the United Kingdom and the developing world, and will be donating all of his future international royalties from Christmas In The Heart to those organizations in perpetuity. Details regarding the international partnerships will be announced next week.

“When we reached out to Bob Dylan about becoming involved with our organization, we could never have anticipated that he would so generously donate all royalties from his forthcoming album to our cause,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America. “This major initiative from such a world renowned artist and cultural icon will directly benefit so many people and have a major impact on spreading awareness of the epidemic of hunger in this country and around the world.”

Bob Dylan commented, “It’s a tragedy that more than 35 million people in this country alone -- 12 million of those children – often go to bed hungry and wake up each morning unsure of where their next meal is coming from. I join the good people of Feeding America in the hope that our efforts can bring some food security to people in need during this holiday season.”

I still don't know what to say.

Green issues not likely to be on gubernatorial table

Environmental issues are likely to get short shrift in this gubernatorial race -- and not only because the two leading candidates appear stuck in attack mode and willing to focus on the smallest of alleged ethical lapses.

It's not only because property taxes and the economy are front in center in voters' minds.

It has to do with a lack of real interest in the environment by either Gov. Jon Corzine or Chris Christie.

Corzine does not have a good environmental record. He has done some good things -- boosting alternative fuels, for instance -- but his larger record is far from green, as this report issued by the EPA (which is led by his former environmental commissioner) shows.

Christie has some interesting (if vague and modest) proposals on his Web site, but has said little about green issues on the stump -- except to slam Corzine for failing to win the endorsement from the Sierra Club (which Christie also failed to earn).

A second group last week also withheld its endorsement -- this time of all candidates:

One of New Jersey's leading environmental groups announced today it will withhold an endorsement in this year's governor's race because its leaders have yet to hear substantive environmental plans from the candidates.

"We really think the candidates thus far have done a poor job crafting environmental positions and showing where they stand on the environment," said Dena Mattola Jaborska, executive director of Environment New Jersey. "Before people go to the polls this fall, we want them to be educated on the candidates positions."

Basically, neither of these guys has much of a record to stand on when it comes to green issues and neither is going to go out of his way to talk about it.

Church, state and gay marriage

Last week, I wrote of the Episcopal Church's slow, but seemingly inevitable move toward blessing same-sex marriages -- some thing I view as indicative of a positive societal change. The church has not done so yet, but it has opened the door for individual bishops to allow the priests that serve under them to go as far as blessing same-sex unions without calling them marriage.

It is, admittedly, a fine point, a bit of language parsing that was designed to maintain unity with the larger Anglican Union, of which the American church is a part.

Contrast this news story on the Catholic Church in New Jersey:

Catholic bishops in New Jersey have begun a campaign against same-sex marriage in anticipation of a possible vote on the issue by state legislators sometime after the November election.

The bishops directed Catholic priests throughout the state to distribute in parish bulletins last Sunday a 2,300-word letter opposing same-sex marriage. The priests are also expected to speak about the issue from the altar after Labor Day.

"The Catholic Church teaches today and has always and everywhere taught for 2,000 years that marriage is the union of one man and one woman," the letter reads. "This great truth about marriage is not some obscure doctrinal fine point but a fact of human nature, recognized from time immemorial by people of virtually every faith and culture."

I have no problem with the church holding the view that same-sex marriage violates church law and refusing to sanctify those unions or allow Catholics to participate in the official spiritual life of the church. That is for the Catholic Church and its believers to deal with.

The issue is what comes later in the letter, according to the Ledger:

The letter distributed last Sunday mentions Vatican writings and a verse straight from the catechism of the Catholic Church, a text that spells out official Catholic teachings.

The bishops reason that, given that God "bestowed" the gift of marriage on humanity, "governments, therefore, have a duty to reinforce and protect this permanent institution and to pass it on to future generations, rather than attempt to redefine it arbitrarily for transitory political or social reasons."

The church, basically, wants the government to adopt and abide by church teachings, to acknowledge that marriage was a gift bestowed by god on humanity -- something that would privilege the church and other religious denominations that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage over Americans who support the legalization of same-sex marriage. (That would be a violation of the First Amendment's establishment clause, which prohibits Congress -- and, by extension, thanks to the 14th Amendment, the states -- from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.")

The dispute, when framed this way, makes it clear that the issue is not necessarily whether government should legalize same-sex marriage, but whether government should be involved in marriage at all and whether it should leave the designation of unions as marriage to the couples involved. Government then could focus on contractual unions between two people, which would be gender-neutral and would cover all of the current 1,000-plus rights and benefits that now go to married couples.

Health care, of course, could be addressed if we were to go with a single-payer system, but loads of others -- access to hospitals, all federal benefits -- are tied to the marriage label. Even in New Jersey, where civil unions are supposed to confer equal status, gay and lesbian couples have faced arbitrary refusals.

Basically, either government -- and I'm talking about Congress and the president and the 45 states who have yet to do so -- must legalize same-sex marriage or get out of the marriage business altogether.

The lion sleeps tonight

Sen. Edward Kennedy, in many ways the most talented and influential of a talented and influential band of brothers, succumbed early this morning to the brain cancer that has kept him away from the institution he had been a member of for 47 years.

Kennedy, for many, was a caricature -- the disoriented drunk of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the protection of privilege that was at the center of the William Kennedy Smith trial, his womanizing, Chappaquidick -- and there is truth in the image.

But Kennedy's legacy is his commitment to a kind of liberalism that had fallen out of fashion as the '70s wore on and moved into the ugly, Reaganite 1980s. It was a commitment to universal health coverage, to education for all, to diplomacy and peace.

For decades, Kennedy was at the center of the most important issues facing the nation, and he did much to help shape them. A defender of the poor and politically disadvantaged, he set the standard for his party on health care, education, civil rights, campaign-finance reform and labor law. He also came to oppose the war in Vietnam and, from the beginning, was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq.

Congressional scholar Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described Kennedy's mark on the Senate as "an amazing and endurable presence. You want to go back to the 19th century to find parallels, but you won't find parallels. It was the completeness of his involvement in the work of the Senate that explains his career."

The Post said the "list of major laws bearing his imprint ... fills pages."

In 1965, he led the successful Senate floor battle that passed what was popularly known as the Hart-Celler Act, landmark legislation that abolished immigration quotas and lifted a 1924 ban on immigration from Asia.

"This bill really goes to the very central ideals of our country," Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate. The legislation, the most significant immigration reform in four decades, passed both the House and Senate by overwhelming margins.

He was long the Senate's leading voice on civil rights, including the 1982 Voting Rights Act extension, as well as efforts to advance the concept of equality to include the disabled and women in the workplace.

In 1972, he was a key supporter of Title IX, an amendment requiring colleges and universities to provide equal funding for men's and women's athletics. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he played an important though indirect role in the 1973 investigation of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. In 1996 and again in 2007, he was the lead Senate sponsor of legislation increasing the minimum wage.

In the 1980s, when a Republican president and Senate mounted a major campaign to roll back programs he had championed, he led the fight to save them. Even in the minority, he worked to expand government's role in providing health care to children, making loans available to college students and extending civil rights to the disabled, among many other embattled initiatives.

He voted against both Iraq wars and challenged the growing militarism.

Health care, however, will be his legacy. While universal health insurance has yet to become a reality, it is because of Kennedy that we are still talking about national health care and are likely to see it come to fruition.

Long before he fell ill, Kennedy made health care a major focus of his career, terming it "the cause of my life." His legislation resulted in access to health care for millions of people and funded cures for diseases that afflicted people around the world. He was a longtime advocate for universal health care and was instrumental in promoting biomedical research, as well as AIDS research and treatment. He was a leader in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Bill -- with senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) -- which allowed employees to keep health insurance after leaving their job.

Health care reform is "a defining issue for our society," Kennedy told fellow senators during a 1994 debate. "Do we really care about our fellow citizens?" It was a question he asked countless times, in one form or another, during his long Senate career. He faced opposition from most Republicans -- and more than a few Democrats -- who insisted that Kennedy's proposals for universal health care amounted to socialized medicine that would lead to bureaucratic sclerosis and budget-breaking costs and inefficiencies.

Receiving a diagnosis in May 2008 of a brain tumor, Kennedy rose from his hospital bed that summer and cast a dramatic vote on the Senate floor in favor of legislation preventing sharp cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. Several Republicans were so moved by his presence that they switched their earlier votes on the bill, giving it a veto-proof majority.

It must have pained him to see the inertia that has stricken the Senate -- and the obstructionist ways of an opposition party unwilling to work across the aisle to move anything forward.

Dispatches: The hinge question on affordable housing

Dispatches is up -- a revised version of my post on affordable housing.

Runner's diary, Tuesday

Once again, I'm back at square one in my running. It's been almost two weeks off the road (or the treadmill), and I could feel the lack of work in my legs and chest. I did manage three miles -- listening to Bob Dylan's latest.

It has to get better, right?

The hinge question

Affordable housing is inherently beneficial.

That's the upshot of today's state appellate court ruling in Burlington County, which ruled in favor of a nonprofit group that was seeking to build a multi-unit development in an area of
Eastampton Township zoned for single-family housing.

The township Planning Board had denied a use-variance application from Homes of Hope to build two buildings containing eight affordable units on a less-then-an-acre parcel that already contained a four-unit brick building. The board had determined that, because the township had met its state-mandated affordable housing obligation -- it had built 100, when 79 were required -- affordable housing did not qualify as an "inherently beneficial use" under state law.

That meant that Homes of Hope was required to meet a more stringent standard to win approval from the board.

The Superior Court in Burlington County ruled last year in favor of Homes of Hope, saying that the the original Mount Laurel decision and the state's Fair Housing Law, which created the state Council on Affordable Housing and the state-mandate, did not intend for "for each municipality to meet only the needs of the homeless within strict boundaries of each town." The affordable housing program, the court said, was a statewide mandate and the individual obligations were just the mechanism used to meet the overall need.

The appellate panel endorsed the lower court's finding, saying that meeting COAH's requirements "does not impact affordable housing's inherently beneficial use status."

Affordable housing continues to foster the general welfare and constitutes a special reason to support a use variance."

There are those who would disagree, especially in suburban communities around the state, where the ongoing need for lower-cost housing is viewed as an imposition bringing school children and the higher taxes necessary to support them.

William Dressel, executive director of the state League of Municipalities, told The Star-Ledger today that the ruling "brings to question what is the real meaning and purpose of the Fair Housing Act."

He's correct, but not because it penalizes towns that have played by the rules.

The court, in calling affordable housing a state obligation, alluded to the central issue facing the state: the arbitrary geographical divisions that govern taxing decisions, land-use planning and nearly every other issue that comes up.

Land-use planning, in particular, suffers from our inability to step beyind these boundaries as decisions get made based on immediate tax implications and not on regional need. Cranbury, for instance, builds warehousing near N.J. Turnpike Exit 8A and along Route 130 because it has open land and a desire to bring in what generally are called "clean ratables," or taxable properties that do not generate school children and require few municipal services. At the same time, it has sought over the years to minimize the number of residential units built in town.

This, under current rules, is good planning; it keeps local taxes manageable.

The problem, however, is that it does little to address the state's need for affordable housing, its segregated housing patterns or school-spending disparities.

That's why the courts ruled that affordable housing should be considered an inherently beneficial use for planning purposes. It doesn't mean that all affordable housing applications must be approved, the court said; it only means that towns must prove "substantial detriment to the public good."

Weighing the criteria in this way makes "it more difficult for municipalities to exclude inherently beneficial uses," but allows for exclusion where the detriment outweighs the benefit to the public good.

Given the current state of the law, unfortunately, it is virtually guaranteed that we will see these law suits occur over and over and over again.

State Sen. Christopher Bateman, R-Somerset, told The Star-Ledger that he planned to seek changes in the law that would protect towns from lawsuits over zoning applications involving affordable housing if they’ve met their state obligation.

"The Corzine administration promised that if towns didn't pursue commercial development and met the quotas set down by the Council on Affordable Housing, they would be protected," he said.

But that does little more than treat the symptom. The issue, as it always seems to be in New Jersey, is the number of competing jurisdictions, each with its own goals and needs and problems and each allowed to operate without regard for its neighbors.

A new paradigm is needed -- fewer towns and better regional planning that focuses on need and not taxes -- but the chances of that happening appear slim.

LBJ lead the way

Lyndon Johnson had his faults -- arrogance, for instance -- and he misread Vietnam. But he committed himself to the war on poverty and civil rights and got a slew of legislation passed that seemed unlikely before he began his push.

On the other hand, Barack Obama has managed so far to take something that seemed popular in the abstract -- healthcare reform -- and let the folks in Congress squeeze it until the last drop of toothpaste was washing down the sink, wiping away much of his public support on the issue in the process.

He could learn a thing or two from LBJ -- so, please Mr. President, read this piece from The Daily Beast.

A mad-cap season

This picture -- my nephew Dan's cap altered by Rosie and Sophie -- kind of sums up the 2009 Mets, I think. Alas.... There's always next year (and a new hat).

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Thin line between grass and astroturf

The conservative blogger, Ryan Sager, makes an interesting point in today's New York Times. Why is it we call what has been happening at the town hall meetings on healthcare "astroturf," but not what the Obama administration - or Move On -- has been doing?

"Astroturf" -- essentially, manufactured public opinion, generally created using the deep pockets of corporations, designed to convince legislators and regulators that the public is behind a particular agenda.

Sourcewatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, distinguishes what it calls "genunine grassroots activism" from "astroturfing" this way:

Unlike genuine grassroots activism which tends to be money-poor but people-rich, astroturf campaigns are typically people-poor but cash-rich. Funded heavily by corporate largesse, they use sophisticated computer databases, telephone banks and hired organizers to rope less-informed activists into sending letters to their elected officials or engaging in other actions that create the appearance of grassroots support for their client's cause.

The question is whether it is fair to describe opposition to the Obama health plan and the public option as "astrotruf." The answer depends, I think, on your partisan beliefs -- sort of like asking whether the chicken or the egg came first.

There always has been a significant portion of the public -- even before the interference of the corporate interests -- that were suspicious of Barack Obama on health care, even if skeptics had been a minority. The money and strategizing coming from the right, in particular the money coming in from the insurance lobby, has only increased the skepticism.

Does that mean that the current opponents, the ones shouting most loudly at the healthcare forums, represent a fake movement? I don't think so.

Consider this from William Greider's 1992 book, Who Will Tell the People, which outlined how various intersecting strands -- campaign contributions, voter apathy, and what he called "democracy for hire" -- were leaving our democracy weakened and ineffective.

"Democracy for hire" is similar to "astroturfing," but encompasses a much greater phenomenon: not just the creation of fictional grassroots support, but manufactured facts and analysis. But it operates in the same way, by manipulating the debate.

Grieder describes a targeted, PR-industry-run campaign in 1990 designed to kill clean-air legislation. The PR firm, Bonner & Associates (yes, the same firm tied to the forged NAACP letters), "persuaded" an array of otherwise apolitical civic organizations in auto-industry states "to take a stand" against tougher fuel standards by convincing the group's leaders that higher mileage requirements "would make it impossible to manufacture any vehicles larger than a Ford Escort or a Honda Civic." (Greider, p. 37)

Greider writes that Bonner was paid "somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million" (in 1990) for "scouring six states for potential grassroots voices, coaching them on the 'facts' of the issue, paying for the phone calls and plane fares to Washington and hiring the hall for a joint press conference." (Greider, p. 37)

The groups lend a different look to the argument, putting a human face on what otherwise is a corporate campaign.

Bonner told Greider (pp. 37-38) that

"It's farm groups worrying about small trucks. It's people who need station wagons to drive kids to Little-League games. These are the groups with political juice and they're white hot."

Greider, however, does view this as truly democratic. (p. 38)

In actuality, earnest citizens are being skillfully manipulated by powerful interests -- using "facts" that are debatable at best -- in a context designed to serve narrow corporate lobbying strategies, not free debate.

The problem with using this concept to describe the shouters at the town halls is that -- even with the concerted corporate effort behind it -- the shouters appear to have come before the corporate money and they also appear to be plugging into some real concerns about the Obama health plan (even if it based on some ugly lies and distortions).

The reality, I think, is that progressives have allowed themselves to be out-organized by the right at a time when progressives should have had the ear of the people in power.

Basically, what the right has done on health care is what the left should have been doing. More from Sager:

One reason the town hall protesters are called Astroturf is that they have ties to groups with corporate financing like FreedomWorks, run by Dick Armey the former House majority leader. But the Obama administration has been doing its own stage managing. At a town hall in Virginia last month, the president took questions from members of organizations with close ties to the administration, including the Service Employees International Union and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. The Web site of another liberal group, Health Care for America Now, instructs counter-protesters to “bring enough people to drown” out the Tea Partiers.

What's the difference?

Not much, really. Sager:

Organizing isn’t cheating. Doing everything in your power to get your people to show up is basic politics. If they believe what they’re saying, no matter who helped organize them, they’re citizens and activists.

The left -- or a portion of it, anyway -- allowed Obama too long of a honeymoon period, which left a political vacuum. Obama and Congress have seen little pressure from his left, and much from his right, creating an imbalance that plays into the outmoded political narrative that the newsmedia has had difficulty moving beyond.

The reality is that the Democrats have spent the better part of the last six months backpedaling on healthcare reform, trying to appease Republicans and conservatives with a weak and likely ineffectual plan that the GOP is not going to support anyway. That's a sucker's bet.

If Democrats were serious about reform, they'd follow the example of U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and be bold and unapologetic in their support for a competing public insurance plan, even if they refuse to go all the way to single-payer.

Dispatches: Faith in commitment for gay couples

Dispatches went up yesterday -- a discussion of the Episcopal Church's slow, but expanding inclusion of gay and lesbians in all aspects of the church. Discuss.

More tilling needed before green shoots can grow

Circuit City closed several months ago, and the Lawrenceville store still has its Lease sign out front. Prospects for filling it, given the economy, seem slim, especially with so many other major retail buildings on Route 1 empty, as well.

Annie talked tonight with friends in South Carolina who are still looking for work almost six months after relocating.

The few manufacturing plants in New Jersey are on the endangered species list, car dealerships are closing, restaurants are cutting back hours, and so on and so on.

I keep hearing about these green shoots, but all I see is pain, pain and more pain. More stimulus is going to be needed -- along with systemic reform -- before anything grows in this fallow economic soil.

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Belmar song

The breeze off the ocean is strong, flapping the green swim flags ang various-colored umbrellas -- and when the sun ducks behind a cloud, it's actually chilly.

But the sun is hot and the water snapping withwhite breakers, seagulls (flying rats) circling above hunting for scraps, and the rhythmic whoosh of the waves is like jazz, like the fragile sheen of brushes on cymbals.

My mind is wandering in the sun, lacking focus as I try to read IF Stone and listen to an iPod playlist of new tunes, obscure ones and classic sounds.

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Christie's friends

There may be nothing to any of these associations and conversations, but Chris Christie's defensive responses -- answer by going on the attack -- do not leave me with a lot of confidence that these stories should be ignored.

Losing a sucker's bet

With every passing day, Barack Obama is making it clear that he is willing to sell out his left flank.

The latest is this, from The New York Times:

The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.

The “public option,” a new government insurance program akin to Medicare, has been a central component of Mr. Obama’s agenda for overhauling the health care system, but it has also emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition. Kathleen
Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, said the public option was “not the essential element” for reform and raised the idea of the co-op during an interview on CNN.

Mr. Obama himself sought to play down the significance of the public option at a town-hall-style meeting on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo., when a university student challenged him on how private insurers could compete with the government.

After strongly defending the public plan, the president suggested that he, too, viewed it as only a small piece of a broader initiative intended to control costs, expand coverage, protect consumers and make the delivery of health care more efficient.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” the president said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

Keep in mind that the public option was a rather weak alternative to real reform (single-payer), but that it was a mechanism that could expand coverage and keep the insurance companies that have been running our healthcare system honest.

The reality is that he lost his healthcare bet before he started -- by allowing the muzzling of single-payer advocates and throwing his lot in with the conservative Blue Dogs in his own party. The Blue Dogs have never been serious about reform, and the more they control the process the more likely it is that we will get something the politicians will call reform but that patients and taxpayers will not.

Dispatches: It's just going to get uglier

I've been preparing for a writing conference, along with all of the other things I have to do at the paper, so the posting's been light. I'm off, however, next week -- so expect a bit more blogging.

In the meantime, read this week's Dispatches on the gubernatorial race.

Questions for the editors @ 1 p.m.

Focus on climate, not just energy

The New York Times gets it -- the climate crisis is, in fact, a crisis and requires more than the rather timid approaches we've taken so far. While it calls the House energy bill a good start -- I think it is unfortunately weak -- it castigates a Senate that is likely to gut what little good is in the bill. It says "there are small but disturbing signs that what this country might have to settle for is another energy bill."

The atmosphere in the Senate is just short of mutinous. The mandatory cap on emissions has virtually no Republican support. There is talk of a turf war between two key Democrats, Barbara Boxer and Max Baucus, whose committees share jurisdiction over the bill. On Thursday, 10 Democrats from states that produce coal or depend on energy-intensive industries said they could not support any bill that did not protect American industries from exports from countries that did not impose similar restraints on emissions.

That means that the current bill, with its relatively weak 17 percent cut by 2020, is likely to look far different come the fall -- especially with the White House remaining "disengaged" on an issue that was one of Barack Obama's chief focuses during the campaign.

What is needed "is a climate bill," the paper says, "one committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in a way that engages the whole economy and forces major technological change."

Without such a bill, America will lose the race against time on climate, lose the race for markets for new and cleaner energy systems, and forfeit any claim to world leadership in advance of the next round of global climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

U.S. inaction might then lead to international inaction as the developing economies -- in particular, India and China -- point to us as hypocrites and refuse to play ball on the issue.

Dreaming of a Spanish stroll

I've been listening to Mink DeVille a lot lately. I've been a fan for a long time, but like so much of what we listen to in our late youth (say 17-22) we forget and let the music recede to memory. Part of it, for me, was the change in technology -- the move from LPs and tape to CDs made the stuff that I had in my vinyl collection somewhat obsolete.

So, about three weeks ago (July 22), I decided to buy a compilation disk -- The Best of Mink DeVille -- because I'd missed the band's mix of blue-eyed soul and punk-rock attitude.

Maybe I knew something I wasn't supposed to know -- Willy DeVille, the band's artistic leader, its chief songwriter and singer, died this week after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The news, which I heard Friday, saddened me more than I would have thought -- DeVille, as I said, had ceased to be a central player in my personal soundtrack. And yet, he was important to me as a roots-rocker with attitude.

In songs like "Cadillac Walk," "Spanish Stroll" and "Let Me Dream If I Want To," he created a geography of sound, a sense of place -- a mythic Brooklyn of the past and present -- that made him stand out from the rest of the punk scene.

DeVille for me combined what I liked best about Southside Johnny and early groups like the Drifters with that in-your-face sense that I got from the rest of his compadres.

Listening today, it might be easy to forget that DeVille was a central player among the New York punkers -- mostly because we've narrowed our sense of what punk is. But DeVille and the rest of the New York scene (Television, Patti Smith, the Contortions, James Black and the Whites, The Shirts, The Ramones, etc.) were always about more than volume and speed. They were about experimentation and a deconstructed nostalgia that remade music at a time when it was dominated by flaccid arena rockers like Styx and REO Speedwagon.

I've probably listened to DeVille's album on my iPod a dozen times since I bought it, not including the songs I've added to various playlists. I'm glad I rediscovered DeVille before he died and know his legacy will live on.

Whose fuzzy math?

From the rightwing blog, Get Liberty, comes this little bit of wisdom and funky arithmetic:

According the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States,” 46.9 million people are uninsured in the U.S. There’s only one problem with this statistic: approximately 31.85 million of them do not actually exist.

The numbers really cannot lie, although the report does. Out of a total population of 297.05 million, the report states on Page 20 that the “number of people covered by private insurance was… 201.7 million in 2006” and the “number of people covered by government health programs was… 80.3 million in 2006.”

Therefore, 282 million had insurance. Which means that out of a total population of 297.05 million, 15.05 million did not have insurance. Right?

Not at the U.S. Census Bureau. There, 297.05 million minus 282 million equals 46.9 million Americans uninsured. How?

Well, call it “fuzzy math.” In the above figure, taken from Page 20 of Census’ report, the fine print reads, “The estimates by type of coverage are not mutually exclusive; people can be covered by more than one type of insurance during the year.” But, nobody can be covered by insurance and not covered by it.

In other words, some 31.85 million people reported as uninsured in 2006 did have some coverage, and the Census included them in both categories. Why? They were probably between jobs at some point during the year, which is not abnormal.

I debated whether I should comment on this, but it was so over-the-top disingenuous and has the potential to leak into mainstream arguments about health care that I thought it best to offer some commentary. It is an interesting way to look at the report, I guess, if you don't mind ignoring what the numbers actually say.

Basically, the Census data shows about 47 million uninsured and and 250 million insured. The discrepency comes from the overlap -- almost 32 million people were covered both by private and government plans, possibly at different times during the year.

This is what Robert Romano, the author of the blog post, is referring to above. He acknowledges what is happening, but then decides he has a better way of looking at the numbers than the report's authors.

Again, I would have ignored this but disinformation has been the driving force for much of the healthcare debate, especially among those opposed to a public option (witness the public relations blitz trying to scare seniors into thinking the government wants them dead, or the attacks on public-run care that ignore Medicare and the VA).

If we don't counter this kind of nonsense, it just floats out there into the mainstream.

A dark anniversary

We can argue about whether the use of the atomic bomb 64 years ago today -- and again three days later -- was justified (I think more and more evidence has come to light raising questions about our need to drop it to end the war), but our inability to ween ourselves from it leaves us vulnerable.

Runner's diary, Thursday

Another three today (on the treadmill) in a cool 26:18, followed by some weights.

iPod: Rachel Maddow

Wrong thinking on the right

You knew this was going to happen -- the right-wing can't abide a Democratic success, especially when Bill Clinton is involved. When all is said and done, Rush Limbaugh, John Bolton and the rest are more concerned about their own political advantage than they ever were about the two American journalists who were facing long sentences in North Korea. They should be ashamed.

Runner's diary, Wednesday

I kept inside today -- the air was thick and heavy, absolutely unbreathable -- but I finished another four and did it in 35:15.

iPod: A mix of some of the better stuff that's come out this year

Chat with the editors, Aug. 11

Fred Tuccillo (left), the editor of The Princeton Packet, and I will be doing a live chat next week to discuss the newspaper, our Web site and the issues facing Central Jersey. Sign up for the chat and receive a reminder e-mail or go to www.centraljersey.com/chat on Aug. 11 at 1 p.m. and join in.

Time for boldness on healthcare and everything else

President Barack Obama finally may be getting it. Seeking bipartisan support for healthcare reform will be impossible.

The president told fellow Democrats during a lunch "they might have to pass a bill with only Democratic votes if Republicans stood in the way."

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said Mr. Obama was ready do battle. Mr. Wyden quoted the president as saying, “The White House is not a bad bully pulpit.”

Isn't this what progressives have been saying since January?

And yet, maybe he's not. The president remains unwilling to go to the mat for any specific healthcare goal, which could leave reform gutted and ineffective. The key to the plan outlined by the president is the public option, the government-run plan designed to compete with and drive down costs at private insurers.

The public option, to my way of thinking, falls far short of real reform -- only a single-payer system can fix the mess that our healthcare system is in -- but it is still better than the various
neutered plans being offered in its stead by so-called moderates.

The consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives being floated, for instance, would lack the scale of the public option, making it far less effective as a counterweight to the insurance companies.

John Nichols of The Nation says progressives need to change the tenor of the discussion, extricating ourselves from "the narrow 'debate' between 'party of no' Republicans who favor no reform at all, and Blue Dog Democrats, whose 'reform' is to make a bad system worse." Progressives, he says, "should just say 'yes' to real reform."

Campaigning for single-payer in August – by demanding that members of the House agree to support such a plan when it comes up for a vote, and by urging senators to schedule and support a similar vote in their chamber – is the best was to assure that whatever reform ultimately comes will err on the side of Americans who need healthcare rather than insurance companies that would deny them that care.

Keeping single-payer off the table -- done at the behest of the insurance industry by Congressional leaders whose campaign chests have been packed with insurance-industry cash -- has meant that the debate has veered wildly to the right, despite the obvious support for reform among the public.

The polls, while not as favorable to the president as they were when the healthcare debate started, show that the public remains strongly in favor of reform.

A Time poll conducted late last month shows that 69 percent of Americans believe it is somewhat or very important that Congress pass reform within the next few months. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters believe the healthcare status quo was only fair or poor and that 60 percent believe the private health insurers are doing only a fair or poor job.

Voters also back expanded coverage by a two-to-one margin, even if that requires subsidies, and by an almost six-to-one margin they support a ban on denying coverage based on a pre-existing coverage.

And, perhaps most importantly, the polls shows support -- 56 percent to 36 percent -- for a public option and a bare plurality (49-46) favoring, yes, a single-payer system.

Basically, the public is on the right side of this debate and well out in front of the politicians.

But that should not be a surprise. The public is not getting campaign contributions from the health insurance and medical industries.

Which brings me back to the Nichols piece. He writes that the current outlines of the debate are more likely to lead to disaster than real reform.

The worst mistake that progressives could make in August would be to put their time and energy into getting members of Congress to agree to back a barely-acceptable compromise that could end up being unacceptable by the time the lobbyists and their political handmaidens finish with it.

Better to get representatives and senators to commit to back single-payer bills.

That does not prevent them from ultimately agreeing to compromise measures.

But it gets them to begin on the side of real reform, and lessens the likelihood that the eventual deals will be as bad as the schemes that the Blue Dogs tried to impose before the break.

And it could break the hold that the conventional wisdom has on Washington -- including that notable change agent, Barack Obama.

The problem is, however, too many progressives are too wed to the president, too invested in his success to see that he has yet to make a real break with what Kevin Baker "the dogmas of the past."

Baker, writing in Harper's, compares Obama to Herbert Hoover, saying he has been unwilling to accept "the inevitable conflict" that has been bubbling up and that "Like Hoover, he is bound to fail."

He has allowed "a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table."

Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.

Obama, rather than using a bully pulpit to push through a bold agenda, he has allowed boldness to die in the Senate and in discussions among what Baker calls the “'key men' of the 1990s," the men who helped create our current financial mess.

None of this should be surprising. Obama always has been a conciliator, rather than a battler, and has always needed a powerful push from his left before he has acknowledged -- let alone followed -- his more progressive instincts.

A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most — ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come — is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”

He adds that "Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest 'new class' — the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age — if he is to accomplish anything."

These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.

Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.

Journalists freed

This is good news -- two American journalists released from North Korea after months of imprisonment. What's the rightwing going to say?

Runner's diary, Tuesday

On sore legs and all,
under a wide-open sky,
Wilco's new tunes
burning up the iPod,
I managed to push
beyond my latest limits
to get in a feisty four.

Yes, four miles my firends. Man have my sights been set lower than they've been in a long time.

Quote of the weekend, healthcare department

Gail Collins, in her back-and-forth with David Brooks on The New York Times Web site, has this to say about the absence of a single-payer option from the discussion on healthcare reform:

Since something like a third of the cost of health care is in administration, and the problem with reorganizing health care has to do with all the multitudinous plans and policies, a single-payer system would be far and away the most cost effective answer. We don’t talk much about it because it isn’t politically possible. But it isn’t politically possible because we don’t talk about it.

Well said.

Runner's diary, Monday

A hot and humid morning, but still a nice morning for an outdoor run. I did my three listening to "Sound Opinions," one of the better music talk shows out there. I did plan to do four, but it was not to be.

Dispatches: New Jersey's greasy palms

I forgot to post this on Tuesday (the week before's also never got posted to the blog), so here it is: Dispatches on Garden State corruption and the need for municipal consolidation.

Sunday-afternoon barbecue and beer

The burgers -- beef, turkey and salmon -- are on the grill, the hot dogs will follow. In the meantime, a nice clearance brew that I found at Joe Canal yesterday, a tasty "Barleywine-style" ale called Criminally Bad Elf. Strong, almost fruity flavor with a bite; the taste resemble a Scotch ale, but a tad sweeter. I'd certainly recommend it.

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