In memoriam, Howard Zinn

I read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States about two decades ago and it transformed my way of reading history, helping to shift my view away from the great men and standard narratives of the history books we had in school and toward a narrative of average people battling elites, fighting for change and to make the dream we have long talked about into a reality.

Like Studs Terkel, he was a radical interested in speaking for those whose voices are all too often silenced.

Through four presidential elections and three wars, I found his voice a necessary tonic -- especially at a time when progressives have ceded their activism during Democratic presidential administrations, as too many have now.

Zinn's people-centric approach informs my poetry -- I tend to write narratives about people we normally ignore or forget about and I try to make connections between the big issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and the people caught in the whirlwind.

I didn't know Zinn, but I felt like I did and I am better for it and I hope the world is, as well.

Some people writing about Zinn:

Daniel Ellsberg

Matt Rothschild in The Progressive

David Zirin in The Nation
And, of course, Zinn in his own words.

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Score one for the president

After a lackluster first year that ended with the loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts, President Obama decided to step into the political lions' den this afternoon.

And by all accounts, he stepped out unscathed, having bloodied the big cats pretty badly.

The president met with Congressional Republicans this afternoon on the GOP's home turf, in what The New York Times called "a session that resembled the British custom where a prime minister responds to questions in Parliament."

Mr. Obama took questions from House Republicans, who pressed him on why he had disregarded their ideas and instead advanced what they called big government solutions rather than more surgical alternatives.

Mr. Obama replied that he did consider many of the suggestions they had made over the past year and incorporated some of them into his initiatives but found others unworkable or simply political posturing. Rejecting the notion that he had pushed a “Bolshevik plot” on America, he complained that Republicans had caricatured him as a radical, making it harder to then sit down and compromise.

Much of the Republican focus was on pushing Obama back on his heels, trying to make him look like the obstructionist in Washington's gridlock culture.

President Obama, however, parried well, deflecting what were bogus claims -- the GOP, after all, has been voting in lockstep, going so far as to engage in negotiations designed to mold legislation that they had no intention of voting for -- with humor and more spine than his party has shown since it took over the majority in Congress three-plus years ago.

The question now is what comes next and will it mean an end to gridlock. And will it result in the kind of legislation that results in improvements to the lives of most Americans.

Politically, the president may have staunched the bleeding -- by allowing the Q&A to happen on live TV, the Republicans gave him the opening he needed to answer their criticisms, to do so in a camera-friendly way that will play well on television.

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Bernanke's getting a free ride

Anyone else with Ben Bernanke's track record at the Federal Reserve would likely find themselves out of a job. But unless all 30 senators who have refrained from commenting on his renomination vote no, opponents opt for a filibuster and convince 20 of those holdouts to join them or enough senators in the pro-Bernanke camp change their minds, we are looking at another four-year term for Bernanke as chairman.

 

For the record, here is how things are lining up, according to Bloomberg:

• Full Senate: 49 yes, 21 no and 30 who have not commented.
• Democrats 35 yes, six no, 17 not commented.
• Independents: one yes and one no.
• Republicans: 13 yes, 14 no and 13 not commented.

The fact that the GOP is abandoning Bernanke -- a Bush appointee who is very much in the Alan Greenspan mode -- and the Democrats are not probably says more about the need for a third party than anything.

 

By the way, both of New Jersey's senators -- Democrats Bob Menendez and Frank Lautenberg -- are on record supporting his renomination.

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Move over plumbers, make room for the telephone repairmen

I wish I knew what to make of this silliness, but it is kind of fun to watch -- like the early stages of a reality show when the whack jobs are still involved.

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Do the math, Mr. President

Just to re-emphasize my point from yesterday, the president is planning to announce a spending freeze during a recession, which is bad policy when the housing market remains in the tank and unemployment is sky high.

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Transcript of an e-mail rant among liberal friends

This is an e-mail chain that some friends of mine ran off today in response to what has been happening with the Obama administration. It is unedited. Read on friends and enemies.

Bill:
I’m done. I’ve pulled the plug. I’m not listening to “America Left” on the radio, nor Maddow/Olbermann on the TV, and I’m just about done reading anything political, online or otherwise. This politics thing is ridiculous. Either Obama never was the candidate that I thought he was (and I wasn’t under any delusions that he was the 2nd coming of FDR), or Rahm/Geithner/Summers are holding his brain hostage. What good is his oration skills if there’s no follow thru? I just got done reading an article in on TPM about the filibuster, and as long as the minority is not paying a price for being obstructionist, there’s nothing stopping them from filibustering everything (which they have). Only the President has the bully pulpit to call them out on their obstruction, only the President has the power to call Lieberman out on his hypocrisy. What good was this wave of goodwill if you couldn’t use it to affect change? For him to ‘work behind the scenes’ allows the minority all the air time, and have allowed them to define all the issues, a rally here or there is not going to change the underlying meme in the media. “No Drama Obama” seems to means constantly capitulating to the minority, what with throwing the TSA and other nominees under the bus instead of calling wack-a-doo DeMint & Co. on their bullshit.

The R’s were on their backs last year, floundering in their own hypocrisy, lacking any kind of coherent message. Even now they’re the party of “No” but he media isn’t calling them on it. Not only are we in danger of a Republican takeover, but the R’s that are going to come into power are the fringe of the fringe.

Ridiculous. I was able to divert my angst by focusing on the Jets, and now that they’re done I suppose I will focus on the Mets (although somehow I think they’ll be just as frustrating as congress).

Hank:
Obama was never the candidate you thought he was, because he never was the candidate he pretended to be. In essence, he is Clinton-redux without the baggage that could have sunk Hillary's campaign. I was hopeful, but never anticipated the kind of transformative approach to government he implied was in the offing.

A close reading of the campaign would remind us that he:

1) never intended to get out of Afghanistan and had always planned to escalate. That discussion was rigged from the start.
2) never intended to challenge the banks. He backed the first bailout without demanding the kind of restrictions on the financial industry needed to rein in its nonsense.
3) was more committed to a vague notion of bipartisanship than to any other principle. Healthcare, the environment, whatever, have all been sacrificed on the alter of his ambivalence toward any kind of ideological spine.
4) was far more of your standard pol than anyone wanted to believe. Forget the nonsense about him being a Chicago pol. That is irrelevant. He may have only been in the Senate for four years when he was sworn in as president, but he served as a state legislator and has been swimming in the cesspool of politics for quite some time.

None of this is to imply that someone else should have been elected -- the options were better than in most years, but still terrible overall.

What has been most frustrating, however, is not that he's done things we had no right to expect him not to do, but that he has completely ignored the progressive base in a way that calls into question his political acumen. He continues to reach out to the right (budget-cutting during a recession? Is he kidding?), even though rightwing voters would never back him or anyone from his party, while giving progressive Democrats and other lefty voters a reason to stay home. I am not asking him to match my borderline socialist beliefs -- only Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich and maybe Russ Feingold could pull that off. Rather, I'd just like him to realize that his political survival and ability to make any meaningful reforms are dependent on keeping his base happy and active, that the independents will follow him if he can get some things done (which he can only do if he plays hardball with the GOP).

At the moment, he is looking far too much like Bill Clinton (without the sexual baggage) as he moves to the right and allows things to grind to a halt. Clinton may have been a two-term president, but his legacy is one of abject failure -- he helped the Dems lose both houses of Congress, enacted a punitive welfare reform bill, deregulated the banks and the communications industry, kept Alan Greenspan at the Fed, and so on. Personally, I was hoping that the man who spoke so movingly of hope during the campaign would be something more than a repeat of the Man from Hope.

Bill:
I guess to your 2nd to last paragraph is where my frustration lies. I didn’t have rose colored glasses on, yes I admired the man but I knew the politician was a compromise. It’s the transactional handling of the whole situation that completely frustrates me. He’s willing to seemingly compromise with a party and that sees no need to compromise, compromises with the Conserva Dems of his own party, and constantly ignores any of the progressives, as if somehow they’re the pariah. I was really hoping that since he didn’t raised money outside of big business / pac / wallstreet, he wouldn’t be beholding to them. Give me something, some reason to feel hopeful, some reason to feel that ‘change’ was more than getting W and those idiots out of office.

Me:
But he did raise significant amounts from those areas -- more in fact than Kerry raised in total in 2004 (just looked at these figures for a column). They made up a smaller portion of his fundraising than they did for any candidate in the past, but only because he raised more by himself from all sources in 2008 than Kerry and Bush raised together in 2004, which had been the record.

The problem in general is that the blueprint for what has happened was right there in the first chapter of his book, The Audacity of Hope, when he made turned the notion of post-partisan cooperation into an end in itself that would supplant any ideology or controlling philosophy.

Vince:
"Give me something, some reason to feel hopeful, some reason to feel that ‘change’ was more than getting W and those idiots out of office."

Wasn't THAT enough?

Me:
Getting rid of W was huge, but he was gone anyway. And not much has changed on the ground -- what happened to the card-check union bill? closing Guantanamo? Restoring habeas corpus? Overturning Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act? The Copenhagen summit, which was only going to produce modest proposals in any case, has come and gone with nothing to show for it. We're still waiting for a watered-down climate bill that is going to be watered down further, the banks are once again making record profits and handing out big bonuses even as unemployment hits 25-year highs and underemployment and those who have left the work force for good are at Depression-era levels. Bush is gone, but we still have Ben Bernanke and Bob Gates and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and administration officials defending the shredding of the constitution.

If all we can hope for our system is that we should be glad that things could be worse, we are in far more trouble than anyone is willing to admit.

Ken (joking):
I’m so sick of you liberal pinko’s and your incessant whining. You’re lucky the “real” Americans don’t line you up on a wall and execute you like you deserve.

Me:
Well said, sir. Well said.

Ken:
But seriously, what do you expect Mr. O to do? The dems don’t vote in lock step like the right does. The dems can’t even keep one radio station going. The country is broke so it’s almost pointless to have an agenda since we can’t afford to implement it.

Me:
Basically, stand up and take his lumps and force the right to do something, to show that it is something more than an obstructionist party. I cannot name one issue on which he's stuck out his neck and shown himself willing to take the political hit. Even Clinton did that on occasion.As things stand, the administration went out of its way to play ball with the GOP, which allowed the party to seem -- but only seem -- as though it were involved in a real dialogue. I just don't think that we would have seen the same kind of thing from FDR, Truman, LBJ or even Reagan.

I think the framing of the discussion -- not just our little venting, but the discussion nationally -- shows how broken the system is. We are willing to live with an unrepresentative Senate (Wyoming and California get the same number of senators? Not exactly one man, one vote) that is made even less representative and democratic because of an arcane supermajority rule. But we moan that a party that has a ridiculous, almost unprecedented majority cannot get anything done.

Instead of calling for reform of the Senate, the president negotiates with Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Instead of making the case that a minority representing an even smaller minority of citizens is holding things up and taht we need to end the charade, he kisses the ring of the pusillanimous Joe Lieberman and the Democrat in name only Ben Nelson. The entire thing is absurd.

I think Ken's question, however, is on point: What did we expect Obama to do? Maybe we have to stop asking those kinds of questions and instead ask ourselves what we are prepared to make him and the rest of our elected officials do. I don't want to sound like some kind of teapartier, but these guys do work for us; it is our government and the people in office were put there by us to do our bidding. If we want Obama to be bolder, we have a responsibility to create the space for him to be bolder. That has been the model the right has used for years -- activism to the right of elected officials, capturing the public discussion and pulling elected officials to the right.

Wayne:
Katie and I watched "An Unreasonable Man" recently, a documentary about Ralph Nader. A lot of lefties demonize him, even those who used to work with him in his glory days of the 60s and 70s. But he did what he thought was right and necessary without regard to personal consequences. Everything I hear below suggests he was right and is right: the Democrats are not the answer: they're just Pepsi instead of the Republicans Coke.

This political duopoly only lends itself to a sick kind of freak-show partisan reality TV, which is more like a sports event than a policy statement, and those accustomed and attracted to this arena are more likely to be self-serving than public-serving.

I'm not sure what the answer is except that the only real change comes from within. You can vote for a man who promises change, but that can never be enough for those who really hope to change ssomething.

I'm going to have Wayne have the last word because I think he hit it on the head.

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A spending freeze? Is he kidding me?

Let's just say that I wasn't very happy when I heard yesterday that President Obama was caving into pressure from deficit hawks and planned to announce a federal spending freeze at a time when a more robust stimulus is needed to get Americans back to work.

According to news reports,

Administration officials announced on Monday that Mr. Obama, in his State of the Union speech, will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that. The initiative, meant to signal his seriousness about restraining the deficit, provoked outrage among liberals in the president’s party because defense spending was exempted, while Republicans have mocked the proposal as too little, too late.

The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.

Security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, would not be frozen; neither would the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The freeze, of course, exempts the very programs that are driving the deficit off a cliff -- the kind of spending that has transformed our government from one that is nominally democratic to a militaristic empire.

Apparently, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) -- one of the Senate's leading progressive voices -- isn't very happy either. From Talking Points Memo:

Start with this: The people who have been most outspoken about debt are the people most responsible for it.... The people, as I said, who have been most outspoken against the budget deficit have been those that voted for the Iraq war, and charged it to our kid, those who voted for the giveaway to the drug and insurance industry in 2003 and charged it to our kids, and those who voted who tax cuts for the rich and charged it to our kids, and those who ignored infrastructure needs in this country for a decade and charged that to our kids. And they come and they're screaming the loudest about the balanced budget. And that disturbs me.

Paul Krugman was even more blunt:

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

And that is what the president has wrought. It would be heartbreaking if it weren't for the fact that Washington political culture is a cesspool of shifting justifications and calculations that too often have little to do with whether I can afford to put gas in my car or my students at the county college can afford even their meager tuition.

The problem is that just about everyone in Washington is myopic, unable to see beyond their narrow interest (i.e., re-election), and that includes the president. Politics no longer has anything to do with policy and we are all the poorer for it.

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Riding the bandwagon into Jets country

I think I picked a good football game to watch after having ignored the sport all season and for most of the last decade or so. I'm not a football fan, as most people know. But I grew up a Jets fan and I think I've earned the right to bandwagon the team this year, given how bad most of the teams I've followed have been for most of my life.

So, I watch a game in which my team tosses an 80-yard TD pass to open the scoring in the second quarter, makes a couple of impressive stands deep in the Colts' zone (including a goal-line stop) and generally plays some good ball. Not that the Colts have been slouches.

So far, it has been a great game and I'm glad to be back on the bandwagon in Jets country, at least for one game (and, hoepfully, one more).

As they say in the land of the green, J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets!

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A letter to the Packet about your's truly

Apparently, my criticism of Obama a couple of week's ago wasn't strong enough for my conservative neighbors. Check out this letter to the editor from the Packet.

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Dispatches: Keep public schools public

Here's my Dispatches column, written in response to Chris Christie's appointment of school-voucher advocate Bret Schundler as education commissioner.

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Arrogance and hypocrisy

The Democratic power structure in New Jersey just doesn't get it. After a half-dozen years in which the party's big dogs have made a mockery of small 'd' democracy, ethics and good government, the new Senate president shows that he is unconcerned with anything but his own power -- the height of arrogance and hypocrisy, as Rosi Efthim points out on Blue Jersey.

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A sudden appearance of spine

Congressional Democrats are finally digging in their heels, for the most part -- though it appears that the sudden appearance of a spine probably comes too late.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that the healthcare bill as it currently stands is essentially dead, thanks to Scott Brown's win in Massachussets on Tuesday and the realization on the part of House Democrats that the Senate bill contained far too many negatives to be considered a positive.

Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been struggling for days to sell the Senate legislation to reluctant Democrats in order to get a health-care bill to the president's desk quickly. But House liberals strongly dislike the Senate version, while moderate Democrats in both the House and Senate have raised doubts about forging ahead with the ambitious legislation without bipartisan support.

The only way to keep the Senate bill alive, Pelosi said, would be for senators to initiate a package of fixes that would address House concerns about the bill. In particular, Pelosi described her members as vehemently opposed to a provision that benefits only Nebraska's Medicaid system. Also problematic are the level of federal subsidies the Senate would offer to uninsured individuals and its new excise tax on high-value policies, which could hit union households.

"There are certain things the members simply cannot support," Pelosi said.

The health bill has been flawed from the beginning, as I've pointed out on more than one occasion. The administration allowed the process to get away from it, leaving it in the hands of people like Max Baucus and others who have proven they owe their allegiance more to the health-insurance industry than to patients. The result has been a gutting of what looked to be a rather moderate bill in the first place. Single-payer was removed from the table before the discussion started and the so-called public option soon followed. The writing of the bill was then handed over to the money folks, who turned it into a massive giveaway to the insurance companies (forcing everyone to buy insurance from private companies while using tax dollars to subsidize low-income coverage).

Brown won, as this post from Corrente points out, because he became the change candidate, running as a populist against a Democratic Party that -- as David Sirota has been saying on his Colorado-based radio show (listen to the podcast) -- no longer is the party of the people but the party of corporations.

That's nothing new, of course. That's why I voted for Nader in 1996 and (gasp!) 2000. I would have voted for him again in 2004, except that the prospect of another four years of George W. Bush scared the hell out of me.

And it will continue to be the corporate party unless voters make it clear that they will run them out of town for it. That's what happened in Massachussets and what was facing Democrat Chris Dodd before he decided to retire. It is what won the nomination and then the election for Barack Obama and what could destroy his presidency unless he rediscovers his inner populist.

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First Amendment v. corporate campaign finance corruption

This decision was not unexpected, but it will present dramatic challenges for those of us who believe that the political system is awash in cash. The 5-4 decision, which found that a film essentially attacking Hillary Clinton as a danger to the nation, was protected speech and that provisions of federal election law that prevented its release violated the First Amendment.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

The issue is a thorny one. Money has overrun the system and squeezed out the voices of regular folks, but the McCain-Feingold restrictions on issue ads always has struck me as an infringment on the rights of political groups to speak on political issues.

Consider the flip test on this one: A group like MoveOn or some other liberal organization creates a documentary on George W. Bush that essentially is commentary and plays like a newspaper editorial critical of the then-president. The group wants to release the film to theaters in September or October of 2004 so that it can affect the campaign debate.

Should it be allowed? And what restrictions should be imposed? That is the crux here.

Certainly, this kind of communication should be disclosed, but should it be banned? And is it the best way to starve the system of the cash that is corrupting it?

I remain a proponent of public financing, which I believe is the best way to control this. But I doubt we'll be hearing anyone in Washington go down this path. Instead, look for the political classes to look for some other way, far less effective (or constitutional) way to address the issue.


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Move left, young man

To build off my last post, I think it is important to counter what is going to be the dominant narrative in the next few days -- that the Democrats are too liberal and are trying to do too much.

Basically, I just don't buy it.

The reality of the last 12 months is that voters were promised significant change -- even if that promise was never explicit in the kinds of programs then-candidate Barack Obama was offering voters. He talked about hope and change, of making big strides into the future, of returning America to its earlier glories -- essentially mixing JFK and MLK into one, overarching narrative designed to plug into the nostalgic streak that drives conservative politics while also offering liberals a progressive idyll to which they could connect.

Liberals heard what they wanted, disaffected conservatives and independents waited and the president, once in power, turned out not to be FDR, Truman and LBJ, but a triangulating Clinton-type (without the sex-capades) without the benefit of the humming economy to keep everyone happy.

The problem is and will continue to be the economy and the Democrats have shown that they have few answers -- or lack the will to aggressively rebuild, to do battle with the interests (banks and investment houses, insurers, the permanent military industry) who stand in the way of change.

As this post on Truthdig points out, the calls from the mainstream media, Republicans and the meak and moderate wing of the Democratic Party to say "Democrats need to move to the right" ignore one simple fact: The party has been heading right "ever since our community organizer in chief walked away from a public option, opened up the national checkbook for the banks and doubled our troop levels in Afghanistan."

Democrats have failed to improve anything since Obama became president, instead offering the nation the spectacle of a handful of Democrats from small states holding the rest of the party hostage.

The Democrats, as I said earlier, deserved to lose this seat, one that had been held by the Liberal Lion, a progressive champion (despite his warts) who always championed the progressive cause. If they want to staunch the bleeding, they need to move to the left, need to embrace the kind of populist remedies -- single-payer healthcare, aggressive bank regulation, an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

They have to stop worrying about what the media has to say, stop worrying about strategizing for November and just stand for something.

A wake-up call

If the Democrats lose the Massachussets Senate seat, as it appears likely will happen, they will have only themselves to blame.

Forget the local aspects of this -- the awful campaign run by the Democrat, the hypocritical way in which the party rewrote electoral law to fill the seat on a temporary basis -- the fault for this loss lies in the party's failure to energize its base not just in Massachussets, but around the country, to get a real health reform bill passed, to fight for a more robust stimulus or enact strict financial regulations to rein in the banks.

Basically, as David Sirota -- among others -- has pointed out, there needs to be a vibrant and aggressive push from the left to pull the Democrats leftward, but a mix of timid gamesmanship on the part of elected Democrats and an unhealthy willingness to become part of the establishment by groups like MoveOn and other Democratic-leaners has robbed progressives of much of their steam, much of their force.

So now, with the Democrats holding only 57 seats in the Senate -- including a half dozen small-state conservative Dems -- the illusion of unity and power has been broken. Now, the party has little reason to humor people like former Democrat and putative independent Joe Lieberman or even Democrats in Name Only Ben Nelson and Max Baucus.

If the Democrats are to salvage any part of their agenda, they are going to have to go on the offensive, the president is going to have to forgo the cautious incrementalism that has marred his first term and turn the bold rhetoric he used back in January 2009 into reality.

Doggy diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Living the dog's life

I think this is how all of us should spnd every Sunday. Dogs really know how to live.

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Seen at WalMart in West Windsor

What's wrong with this picture? I'm not sure this is much of a bargain.

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Grassroots: Sunshine on the markets

Grassroots, my Progressive Populist column, is on the move to bring some accountability to Wall Street.

Christie makes first move on school choice

This is not a good start, as far as I am concerned, appointing one of the more conservative Republicans in the state and its biggest advocate for school vouchers as commissioner of education.

Brett Schundler, former mayor of Jersey City, remains an advocate -- but then, so is Gov. Chris Christie. But the voucher issue was not one that was front and center during a campaign focused on one issue -- taxes -- and needs to be explored during the confirmation process.

Schundler needs to be asked tough questions about school choice -- not just about how it improves education for some, but what happens to the schools that lose students. It is easy to say that competition will improve all schools, but that is not how it is going to work.

Dispatches: Obama's first year

Dispatches is available online -- on Obama's first year in office.

Leadership vaccuum

Most of the state's papers have said this about the three abstaining Democrats, but I think Al Doblin puts it best -- because he reminds readers that Sen. Steven Sweeney is about to take over as senate president. Voting no was bad enough -- and there were 20 who did so -- but abstaining was the height of cowardice that no apology can offset.

Does the public advocate have a future?

It seemed pretty obvious that Chris Christie wasn't going to keep Ron Chen as public advocate. The question is whether he'll follow Christie Whitman's playbook and try to eliminate the position.

Time bombs in the healthcare bill

Advocates for moving ahead with health-insurance reform in its current form need to read this story from The Washington Independent:

At issue are employer-based wellness programs, which aim to prevent common conditions related to smoking, overeating, lack of exercise and other unhealthy behaviors — conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. Both the House and Senate bills promote such programs, but the Senate bill, critics argue, would allow employers to raise rates on all of their workers, then lower them only for folks who meet certain wellness targets. Such a system would effectively force less healthy workers to subsidize the insurance plans of those more fit — an unfair penalty in the eyes of many medical groups.

“Incentives quickly become penalties for those who can’t meet the requirements,” said Sue Nelson, vice president for federal advocacy at the American Heart Association. “This would really become medical underwriting by another name.”

Current regulations allow group plans to offer rewards up to 20 percent of premium rates for employees who meet certain health goals. The Senate health-reform bill would effectively make that rule law, while also bumping up the variation allowance to 30 percent — roughly $4,000 for the average family plan. The Senate bill would also allow officials at the Health and Human Services Department to go even higher — up to 50 percent.

Outside of the group market, the Senate provision would also create a 10-state pilot program testing the advantages of the wellness incentives for individuals buying insurance on their own.

Health advocates are right, of course. Offering discounts for certain behaviors is a backdoor way of charging the less healthy more for their insurance. The insurance companies, after all, are not going to forego their profits; if they offer discounts to some, then others will have to pay more to offset the discounts.

“When you start picking people off on an individual basis [and] reducing their premiums individually,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said during the Finance Committee markup, “you do not adjust for what else may be happening within that [coverage] universe, and then other people are picking up the overall costs.”

My fear is that this is not the only timebomb in the legislation and that many will detonate only after it is too late.

The reality is that we have allowed this debate to go off the rails. The primary goals -- universal access to affordable insurance that covers most healthcare problems -- have lost out to something that might be good for insurers and the elected officials who take their campaign contributions, but does little for the rest of us -- a decision to keep the insurance industry whole.

Rather than challenge the industry's monopoly, we are mandating coverage and helping lower-income folks pay for it with subsidies, essentially shovelling billions of tax dollars into the pockets of the insurance cartel.

At the same time, the handful of new regulations and restrictions that have been floated are rather weak, and riddled with loopholes like the wellness-program exemptions, which prompted this response from a "former insurance industry executive," who told the Independent that "it will take little time for companies to exploit the loophole in the Senate bill."

“Insurers can smell profits a mile away,” said Andrew Kurz, former chief financial officer at Blue Cross-Blue Shield Wisconsin. “This is a loophole they will drive right through on day one.”

This, and all of the other loopholes.

I hate to see reform fail, but I'd rather have real reform than reform in name only. Afterall, we may not get another bite at the apple on this for a long, long time.

The majority and the rights of the minority: GOP ballot proposal a slap to gays

State Republican Chairman Jay Weber sent out this statement today on the state Senate's wrong-headed vote on same-sex marriage:

“From the beginning, Republicans have opposed legislative and judicial efforts to redefine marriage in New Jersey and called for any changes to be put on the ballot for voters to decide. We believe that the majority of New Jerseyans agree with that position, and following the failure of this bill in today’s Senate vote, I am heartened to see that the Senate has respected the will of the people.”

Back in the early 1960s, marriage was defined as not only being between a man and a woman, but interracial marriages were against the law in many states. And the bulk of Americans probably wanted it to stay that way.

Forty years have passed and there are few today -- aside from a couple of recalcitrant southerners -- who would seek to take us back to that point.

But let's go back there for a minute -- at least intellectually -- and ask the question that Weber's statement raises: Should the lifting of the ban on interracial marriage have been "put on the ballots for voters to decide"? Of course not.

So, why should same-sex marriage be put to a referendum?

The Senate, unfortunately, has allowed conservative religious leaders and their political acolytes to elevate the strictures of their belief system above those of the rest of the state's citizens, which does a disservice to gays and lesbians and anyone who disagrees with the conservative religious position.

I've said for a long time that the best approach, legally, might be to remove the word marriage from the statute book and replace it with some other legal construct and leave marriage to the realm of religion. I understand the cultural attachment to the word, but I just can't see how we're going to get past this without taking the debate in a new direction.

Any thoughts?

Filibuster blues

The headline of this post from OpenLeft says it all:

Democrats would gain 10 Senate seats by eliminating the filibuster

It's not about gaining seats, of course. It is about allowing the majority to do what it was elected to do.

Bay deal looks logical

If this nugget from today's NY Post piece on the Jason Bay signing is accurate, the contract actually looks pretty good.

Bay's deal includes a full no-trade clause and an $8.5 million signing bonus, according to The Associated Press. He will make $6.5 million in salary this year and $16 million for each of the ensuing three seasons. His option would become guaranteed if he reaches 600 plate appearances in 2013 or 500 plate appearances in both the 2012 and '13 seasons. The contract's total value could reach $80 million.

I'm not crazy about full no-trades, but the vesting clause sets the bar high enough that this deal can only go to five years if Bay remains productive. If not, there is little chance that he will hit the plate appearance marks needed.

So we shall see.

At the moment, I'm cautiously optimistic.

Time to vote or get off the pot on marriage equality

This is how democracy is supposed to work, right? Post the bill, debate it and vote on it so everyone in the state of New Jersey can see where each of our 40 state Senators stand on the marriage equality issue. There is a good chance, unfortunately, that it will fail, but it will "out" those who refuse to see this as an issue of civil rights.

Don't buy war bonds

Sen. Ben Nelson, the conservative Democrat from Nebraska, is pushing the idea of funding the war in Afghanistan by selling government bonds -- borrowing an idea that worked well during World War II.

But as this piece points out, the economy has changed, making the bond sale problematic.

More importantly, the Afghan and Iraq wars are not very popular; any funding mechanism based on a voluntary contribution is going to fail.

If we believe these wars are necessary -- they aren't, but if we want to fool ourselves into believing they are -- we should be honest and pay for them out of our budget the way we pay for everything else.

Illustrating history

I found this piece on the late, great David Levine interesting, if only because the illustrators/cartoonists mentioned -- his peers and followers -- are the great left-liberal illustrators of our day, drawing for The Village Voice, The Nation, etc.

Levine was a great illustrator with a keen eye and his impact on the somewhat staid New York Review of Books cannot be underestimated. He will be missed.

Runner's diary, Tuesday

As I wrote last week, I am not a big believer in new year's resolutions. If you want to make a change or set a goal, there is no reason you cannot do it on May 2 or Sept. 14. The fact that so many of us opt to focus on Jan. 1 -- and then abandon the goals almost as fast as they are set -- seems a bit dopey.

In any case, here we are in a new year and I'm back at the running game. My goal is to run a half marathon at Rutgers in May, which means I must get my fat and sorry tuchus in gear. So far, I've hit the treadmill twice, running three yesterday and two today. My goal for the week is 10 miles, with two miles added every week for the next month or so. We'll see.

Class begins again on Jan. 25 -- I'm teaching at Middlesex County College twice a week -- which tosses my running schedule into the air, but I have to make that commitment to get back to the kind of aggressive training I had been doing until the last year or so.

Time to get serious.

Optimism at the Garden: The Knicks turn a corner

A 43-point win for the Knicks is unfathomable. I caught a few minutes of the game, while cleaning up and cooking, and it is clear that a) the Pacers are an awful team and b) the Knicks have turned some sort of corner. After 1-9 and 3-14 starts, the team has gone 11-6 and has positioned itself to be in the playoff hunt (it is ninth in the conference at the moment).

Part of it appears to be a willingness to play defense, and the sudden coming together of a new core -- Wilson Chandler, Dano Gallinari and David Lee, along with veterans Chris Duhan and Al Harrington. Today, for instance, each member of the new core dropped 20-plus, Duhon had 18 and seven assists and Harrington, who played just 17 minutes, popped for 15.

If they can keep this up, can drive into the playoffs and make a showing there -- stretching the first round to the limit -- the team might be able to lure one or two of the prime free agents out there. They have the cash and if they can show that Gallo and Chandler are for real and they can wrap up Lee at a reasonable price, anything is possible. This team remains far from real contention, lacking a real center or a point guard who can take them deep into the playoffs. Duhon is a solid playmaker, but would be better suited to coming off the bench or playing BJ Armstrong's old role with the Bulls.

For the first time since the end of the Patrick Ewing era, Knick fans have a right to be modestly optimistic.

Correction: Brilliant Disguise? What was I thinking?

I have to correct myself. Somehow, I misnamed a Springsteen album -- me! -- calling it by the first single released in today's year-end music post. The disc in question should have been Tunnel of Love. What exactly happened?