Dennis Kucinich Raises His Retirement Age by Two Years

I'll admit I will miss Dennis Kucinich in the congress, fighting the good fight, or at least playing a character on television who does. OK, that sounds churlish, like I'm edging towards saying "don't let the screen door hit you..."

Oh, you know.

If you don't know, let me be clear: Yes, while Dennis Kucinich does have an inspiring background story, truly raising himself up from humble beginnings, ultimately it wasn't enough. While he did some good things in public life, like fighting for the municipal electric system in Cleveland and voting against the Iraq war in 2002, and against the initial ACA legislation in 2009, ultimately he buckled two years ago in 2010 on the final vote on ACA in March of 2010, surrendering his consent to the poison pill of the individual mandate that he knew was still in the contract he signed. Hell, even Arthur Silber praised Kucinich in the fall of 2009 for standing up against the individual mandate, but of course standing up doesn't count for much when you subsequently sit down, and Dennis sat when Barry and Nancy told him to.

Undoubtedly there are other pressures we don't even see. I'm not even making fun of his alleged belief in UFOs, I couldn't care less about that. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the peculiarity of his pledging his Iowa delegates to Obama in January of 2008, and not been so moonstruck.(I note that presently Ron Paul is making similar gestures of deference towards Romney.)


One imagines Kucinich's vote was important because his liberal cred had value, so that on the evening news you could see a story about how a prominent liberal stalwart, etc, etc. (They monetize darn near everything nowadays!)

Next case.

I am wizened and grizzled, and I know better than you, because my cynicism gleams in the darkness. No, that's not true either, and far too many bloggers adopt that pose because it makes them feel powerful. Snark aside, I genuinely liked Kucinich, and when he buckled I was greatly disappointed. To be fair I still like him, and wonder if presently a career like his is the best that can be hoped for from people in public life. If so, this only reinforces the sense that one is better to stay away from politics whenever possible.

Kaptur beats Kucinich in Ohio Democrats' battle, will face 'Joe the Plumber'

CLEVELAND -- Veteran U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur defeated Rep. Dennis Kucinich on Tuesday in a closely watched Democratic battle in a newly drawn congressional district linking Toledo and Cleveland along the Lake Erie shoreline.

She will face Samuel Wurzelbacher, who became known as "Joe the Plumber" for expressing working-class concerns about taxes to then-candidate Barack Obama during a stop in the region in 2008.

The redrawing of the 9th District meant at least one of the Democrats' political careers representing Northern Ohio in Congress would end Tuesday night.

Kucinich conceded defeat shortly after midnight, accusing Kaptur of running "a campaign lacking integrity, filled with false truths."

The 4th way, or possibly the 5th way. Sorry, I've lost track

The best way, possibly, to fix the deal is to primary you-know-who, and the rest of his minions. Mockery of the tea party and the falseness of their grass-roots origins notwithstanding, that's what they did.

Does the democratic party deserve saving? This is a silly question; what does "deserve" have to do with anything? It's like saying this cardboard box has been in my family for years, and it used to contain some really swell stuff. I can't throw it away.

It needs to be retooled to serve people's needs if this is possible, or discarded if it isn't, with no sentimentality. It's had a good run, or a bad run, or a mostly bad run with some bright moments, or whatever.

It may of course be too late, as a key provision of the poison pill is scheduled to take place in late 2012, just after the election.


Oh by the way, welcome back.

ABC News vs. tax hikes

note: update below.

The video is from the ABC nightly news, "Debt Ceiling Crisis: What Would You Do?"


It really should be titled, "what would you cut?" because it certainly seems that this was how things were presented to these panelists: that addressing the current budget debate requires believing that the budget has to be cut, taking this as received wisdom. Also, we have the sense of the false limit of a "spectrum" that runs from Tea Partier to "Liberal Democrat", i.e., you have to believe in the system(and accept that the Tea Party is part of that system, while anybody to the left of the supposedly liberal Obama is not.)

I note the two GOP types are older and seem more self-assured in their demeanor, in contrast with the other three participants, who seem more sheepish and unsure of themselves; maybe they were selected for this. The diffident three end up being cowed by the tea partier and the other republican regarding raising taxes on the wealthy, while the panel cuts social security, raising the retirement age to 68. Additionally I have to wonder how much this process and their conclusions were steered by the reporter and how it may have been further steered in the editing.

Meanwhile, from Andrew Leonard in Salon(via Duncan):

How to make a bad economy even worse:New GDP numbers should be a warning bell for Obama and Congress. But they're not listening
[...]
Yes, we need a deal that avoids default. But if the GDP data proves anything, spending cuts shouldn't be part of it. Shrinking state and local budgets are already a significant drag on growth. Consumer spending is weak. And yet everyone seems to agree: Obama, Republicans and Democrats, that the first order of business should be shrinking government even further, subtracting even more demand from the economy, and likely accelerating our economic decline.

One of the problems with critiquing the shortcomings of mainstream news reportage and figuring out what's really going on is that corporate and agenda-driven journalistic portals are rarely uniformly biased or distorted; if they were they would be reliably unreliable. Salon editors sometimes make excuses for Obama, but to their credit they also provide a platform for Glenn Greenwald. Leonard is absolutely correct here that shrinking state and local budgets are having a harmful effect on economic growth, but he also describes GOP brinksmanship as incompetence, which is highly questionable. This Shock Doctrine-esque behavior has been highly effective in moving the debate to a point where the failure of the 2009 stimulus is now axiomatic and the debate is essentially cutting entitlements a little versus a lot, as opposed to, say, that the stimulus was bungled, or too small. (At least he acknowledges that Obama seems to assent to the hacking away.) Of course it would be nice if ABC's Brian Ross had exposed his panel (and the viewers) to an argument like Leonard's, and discussed the traditional economic position that cutting government budgets in a recession hurts the prospects for an economic rebound.

ABC's panelists in the video above were familiar with the notion that raising taxes on the wealthy hinders job creation, and selecting a college aged democrat to debate this with a self described businessman representing this talking point seems like a tailor made lay-up for the GOP position. (For what it's worth, I tend to think the businessman believes this, and isn't just deliberately misleading the kid. Maybe Brian Ross believe it too.)

see also, Bruce A. Dixon, "Obama & the Fake Debt Ceiling Crisis: This President Is Really Just Smarter Than You Are"(via KFO)

But what if President Barack Obama never intended to fight for jobs or justice? What if he believes the nonsense about Wall Street being “job creators” instead of economic vampires?
[...]
What if Obama is not weak, or timid, or vacillating or waiting for us to “make him do it”? What if what we've seen is all there is, all there ever was?

The truth is that Barack Obama's actions are entirely rational, understandable and even predictable if you suppose him to have been a vicious, vacuous and cynical right wing operative from the very beginning.

The historic pattern of post-sixties Democratic candidates has been to come in on the high tide of public disgust at Republican rule, but to push the pro-corporate agenda further than would be allowable under Republicans.

The rest is here and well worth your time.

update: also via KFO, from the Economic Collapse blog: "Broke! 10 Facts About The Financial Condition Of American Families That Will Blow Your Mind"
(incidentally, re no. 7, I think they still want your 2½ percent.)

the above video has moved, here.

Confuse dem

part 2 is here; MSNBC used to offer embed codes for their online videos, as I recall, but this one didn't have one.


1."Why Obama is winning the debt war"
[MSNBC video link is here] If you want to watch all of the video continuously it's here.

July 12: "MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell explains how President Obama continues to outsmart, out-strategize and out-talk the Republicans, in the debt ceiling standoff."

2.Salon, "Why Mitch McConnell will win the day", Robert Reich


3.Scarecrow(at Firedoglake), "Why Is Larry O’Donnell Implying Obama Lied to the Country and the Tea-GOP?"

The clip of Lawrence O'Donnell has to be seen to be believed. You probably should watch it continuously via the MSNBC link. I'm reminded of the healthcare debate in late 2009 and early 2010, when I got the distinct impression that the administration was trying to confuse people about what exactly was covered by the Democrat's/Obama's healthcare bill and how he regarded the public option McGuffin, as numerous interim versions of the bill were reported on, many released as downloadable PDFs[pdf; pdf2] but even the one that was finally voted upon in March '10 was in fact supposed to get some more fiddling down the road.

Now of course both Obama and the GOP are trying to confuse people, and getting able help from people like O'Donnell. In national polls you often hear about how people have a low opinion of the news media in general, but my impression is that they trust reportage a lot more than a positive or negative response to a poll question may suggest. After all, even though a majority of people polled are against increasing the debt limit, most of these people didn't worry about it one bit prior to 2009, while the federal debt grew like a cancer under George W. Bush, and majorities of republicans, democrats and tv reporters said nothing.

At any rate, FDL's Scarecrow(above) is absolutely correct that bragging about how crafty and dishonest Obama is being in negotiating with the republicans is absurd, even risible. O'Donnell's spin is duplicitous on several levels, apart from the obvious one of pleasing corporate, as BDR might say. He speaks (we assume) to democrats, congratulating them on their presumed worldliness and canniness in being "in on the con," encouraging them to find gamesmanship and opacity laudable, in much the way the grown ups in the story of the Emperor's new clothes thought they were being reasonable and adult by playing along. So a concession is not a concession, and anyone who says otherwise is not cool. Of course even MSNBC has millions of viewers, and one imagines some of them are republican, or at least lean that way. So at another level he's doing his job by annoying those republican viewers with that same schtick; one man's craftiness is another man's flim-flammery. On a third level, perhaps, is contempt for both of them.

Many observers have suggested that it took raving anti-communist Nixon to go to China and so it follows that it takes Obama the purported Muslim-Socialist-Commie to cut(or gut) social security and medicare. It certainly looks like we're headed in that direction, and the dancing around is meant to make sure stupid republicans will blame Obama and stupid democrats will blame the GOP. What if they're both right?

Maybe if Obama does as he's told he'll get to run against wacky Michele Bachmann, and if he doesn't he'll get to run against Mitt I-got-your-healthcare-reform-right-here Romney.(And if he really misbehaves, Rick Perry!) Speaking of polls, many recent ones suggest that even republicans generally worry about preserving these programs. To be mystified by who wants this to happen requires a belief in the 'combat' between the two parties and that the guys on your side are looking out for you, no matter what they may actually say or do. So it helps if you are confused.


see also

Mike Whitney, "Debt Ceiling Kabuki"

Rob Payne, "Balloon payment"

Dennis Perrin, "Obvious Things"

2 November 2010

Hey, where are all the links?

Oh, you're no fun. OK, here's one:

Dog bites man; chickenshit voters afraid of 'wasting' their vote

My point is election or no election, in the larger sense this was just another day. If you look at Obama's faux liberalism of 2009-2010, with healthy majorities in both houses, there's every reason to believe that losing one house will only result in giving him more substantial cover for doing what he really means to do, or conversely to avoid doing what he really means to avoid doing. I imagine that Obama will publicly praise Reagan so repeatedly in the coming week that it'll make any self-respecting democrat want to puke. (Any self-respecting democrats left?)


Do you wonder if election results are crafted ahead of time by the people who own the democracy? It's an interesting question. One imagines recovering Wiccan Christine O'Donnell will be blamed for losing the GOP the Senate, and op-ed types will talk about how "lucky" the democrats were. Think about it: O'Donnell had a total of some thirty thousand votes in Delaware's GOP primary. Thirty thousand hits on a new video wouldn't even get you a contract to advertise candy bars on your Youtube channel. But thirty thousand votes, and that was all it took to give O'Donnell the celebrity status she presumably always wanted.

And all the establishment GOP had to do was sit on their hands in the smallest state that's near enough to Washington for the people who matter to pay attention.

For some time now our betters on the teevee have been predicting that the midterms would demonstrate a repudiation of Obama and Obama-ism, whatever that means. OK, there is no such term as Obama-ism, it's my word. But what would Obama-ism be, if there was such a thing? For one thing it means a smallish stimulus larded with tax cuts, which of course went to people who actually have jobs, unless they were employed full time in 2008 or 2009 and lucky enough, as it were, to subsequently lose their jobs. And there was a minimum income you had to make to get a tax cut, such that you probably also got unemployment insurance, further decreasing the likelihood that recepients of BHO's tax cut(widely called a tax rebate) were tent city denizens.

I'm not saying that Obama's tax rebates were undeservingly disregarded as having little effect, and in fact he deserved far more credit. Tax cuts are usually stupid, especially in a low tax environment. Tax cuts in a recession, by their definition, are funds for people who are probably still employed. Yeah, I know, they're supposed to "trickle down" (or out) to the economy as a whole thereby stimulating spending, but if businesses are avoiding hiring because they don't see a meaningful recovery in sight, this suspect trickle is pretty meaningless as a stimulus. So one of the results is that BHO and the democratic congress get blamed for wasting money. More to the point, deliberately bungling the stimulus(as well as deliberately bungling healthcare reform) results in an object lesson for voters in why Keynesianism doesn't work. It does, or at least it can, but millions of Americans who should know better, not just the tea-partiers, now see it as a discredited and obsolete economic philosophy, even though many don't even know its name.

The Wilderness

update below.

In “Can’t argue with that” Jonathan Schwarz quotes Chris Hedges, thus:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

I wrote in the comments:

Although I think Chris Hedges is generally on the right side, his habit of making sweeping pronouncements at the expense of discussing "prim and proper" policy specifics has always rankled me.
[...]
I'd have more sympathy with his thesis if he was willing to more specifically criticize Obama and distinguish between the democratic party leadership and the concept of liberalism. My guess is that Hedges would respond that a critique of Obama and the dem leadership is implicit in his comments, but it isn't, and Hedges' conflation lets obedient dem voters off the hook for their sheepish loyalty to the party.

Mike Meyer used to write in ATR comments about the need for a viable 3rd party. Well the creation of a viable 3rd party will never happen if its regarded as something that needs to be put off, perpetually, until one more election in which you back the dems. It's like that one more cigarette before you quit. There is nothing that Obama would willingly do with 230 or 240 house members sworn in on 1/2011 that he wouldn't be able to do with just 210 or 205, because he is a phony-baloney democrat and merely a bag man for the finance industry.

Their decision, for example, to avoid voting on repealing tax cuts just means they're hoping to be "forced" to save the rich man's tax cuts next year, like a drunk who threatens the other guy while he's being held back by his more sober friends.

...

I reworded the comment above slightly, see below.* Of course I should have added that most democrats that are higher up the dem food chain are phony-baloney democrats now.

Hedges’s main point, that the tea partiers exist because supposedly liberal constituencies have sold out liberalism is at least partly correct. I think it’s more accurate to say that the democrats have been selling out the New Deal as a rear guard action to hold on to power without having to do the presumably riskier task of directly confronting Reaganism. (Ian Welsh suggests this process is nearly complete, and it’s difficult to argue with his darker assessment.)

Hedges also seems to accept the GOP rhetorical trap of falling for the distinction between the working class and "snooty liberal elites" when in fact most tea partiers are middle class types who have health insurance and jobs or pensions and are afraid that they'll have to pay for subsidizing the growing ranks of poor people, all the while that they stupidly hector for tax cuts and against deficit spending. What’s particularly maddening about the ascent of Obama is the crisis of the fall of 2008 was the best opportunity for an ideological counter-strike against Reaganism that our society has had in 15 or 20 years, and instead we got a phony health care reform that is set up from the start to be gutted later except for it’s most noxious aspect, the individual mandates that will force people to go to the private sector and will eventually destroy medicare as well. At least we have our distractions.

(In fact the tea partiers are quite correct to object to the individual mandates; it may even be their only salient aspect. Just as, ironically, it will most likely be the one plank of Obama-ism they will never be able to dislodge.)

Chris Hedges, Truthout, “The World Liberal Opportunists Made”

Ian Welsh,"How the next 4 years will play out"


*update: originally I quote Hedges briefly, thus:

"The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky."

Later in the essay he criticizes liberals for shutting out and marginalizing Chomsky. OK, which is it?

Ian in the comments as well as a commenter at ATR have convinced me this is not correct.-JV

Caruso resurfaces

John Caruso at Distant Ocean has been on a break for a while, something I'm getting ready to do. He wrote on Friday:

If you're hankering for something of substance, read John Halle's response to Robert Parry's hauntingly familiar argument about why you should vote for Democrats, and how if you don't, every bad thing that's ever happened is your personal responsibility. Thrill at the fanciful flights of logic as Parry opines that you may have literally "doomed the future" through your desire to "feel morally pure." And when you've finished reading, repent your heresy and hand your vote back to the party that rightfully owns it. Robert Parry commands you!

Sweet denial

Avedon:

Paul Rosenberg says, "David Axelrod is clinically insane," after his astonishing speculation that, "I'm hoping that with more seats, the Republicans will feel a greater sense of responsibility to work with us to solve some of these problems." This is the kind of moronic crap that routinely comes out of the White House - the hope, or at least claim, that bipartisanship is a worthy goal that will somehow be met by greater and greater victories for the right-wing. Me, I'm thinking the behavior of the White House makes perfect sense if they are playing for the other team.

Well that's it, isn't it? People talk about how weak and unfocused the democrats are, how they lack message discipline, etc. Of course they do. How can you have "message discipline" when your real message is "we're just like the republicans, just somewhat less so." I mean you can't come out and say that, right? (Kind of wish they would, although you'd think people wouldn't be so dense, and it shouldn't be necessary...)

Maybe this isn't universally true, and maybe there are individual races, especially in the lower ranks, in non D.C. races, where voting Dem may make sense. I don't know. For example on a personal level I'm still wrestling with whether or not it makes sense to vote for democratic challenger Bill White for governor. The Texas Green candidate, Deb Shafto, mainly talks about federal issues like protecting social security, which are irrelevant in a governor's race, and which make it hard for me to take her seriously. On the other hand maybe building a real third party, at least in its nascent stages, involves not caring about whether or not the early sacrifical candidates are viable.(maybe that's the argument behind Christine O'Donnell.) Or is it building a second party?


Charles Babington AP,"Dems to voters: You may hate us, but GOP is worse"

Norman Solomon, "No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us"

Three from Bill Noxid: "Free in our Time"(2006),

"Anatomy of American Ignorance"(2009)

and "The American Morality Myth" (August 2010)

Bob's response to comments for "In case you missed it"

My comment was too long to stick in the comments section, so here it is as a post:

I spent most of my working life in a union and so I view political parties in large part through a class analysis. What does each party, or more accurately, what does each candidate do for the working class? In the San Francisco Bay Area that has meant voting for a Democrat. (I think I might have voted for the liberal Republican Milton Marks at some point in the late 70s or early 80s. Or maybe I thought about voting for him.)

What an individual candidate stands for and how a political party functions at a national level are two different things. I suspect that, say, Barbara Boxer, will support whatever the final healthcare bill is and not agitate too loudly for a public option, not because she opposes one, but because the bill the best that the party leaders will allow. Not get, mind you, but allow.

I say that I view things through a class analysis. But that doesn't mean that I view my union as a crystaline prism. In January 2008 the national president of our union came to our branch meeting to pitch for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for President because of her position on healthcare. But knowing our national, which makes oodles of money on the healthcare plan that it offers, I more than suspect that Hillary wasn't telling our president the virtues of single-payer.

Differences between the two major parties were clearer in my youth. The drifting of both the Democratic and Republican parties to the right is not a function of what the citizenry generally feels. The drift is a reflection of the increased power that wealth has. I think a better, clearer scale than left-right is top-bottom. Ben Nelson doesn't represent his voters. He represents money. Granted, many in Nebraska believe the scary myths generated by reactionaries, but again, those myths were created and funded by the wealthy to scare people into voting their fears. (German corporatist Fritz Thyssen's money helped scare Germans about Jews and get Hitler elected as much as Rupert Murdoch's money helps Republicans through its fear propaganda.)

One might point to the DLC back in the 80s as the turning point for the Democratic Party's shift. If I stopped drinking for a few days I'm sure I could remember plenty of pro-corporate Democrats earlier than that but the DLC is a good place to start analyzing the recent historical drift in the Democratic Party.

My reason in linking to the article was to point out both the process of "regulatory capture" and how the Democratic Party has essentially used that process in the healthcare debate to elbow out Republicans as the best friends of capitalists. But more than that, I hoped to point out that all Democratic candidates, because they nominally are the party of the people, will suffer from the damage this bill may very well do to its constituency. A good equivalent would be how the Democratic Party suffered from Bill Clinton (another DLCer) and his trade deals which served corporate interests and killed manufacturing jobs for the middle class.

This is an admission by me, as Rob seems to point out, that I think that there is a difference between the two parties and that the Democrats are superior. And I do, relatively. I see the Republican Party as the equivalent to Mussolini's Fascist Party in the 1920s and 30s. I've already discussed how I see the Democratic Party and the difference between Party and individual politician.

However, I think that any analysis that only sees continuity (that is, no difference between the two parties) fails because it doesn't explicate the dilemma, even if both parties end up in the same place. And if we don't better understand how we got here, and we don't let others know, then we're doomed.

Got that? I'm an optimist.

That doesn't mean that I'm at all happy with the current political situation.

Charles, I find some of Ron Paul's positions intriguing but others completely wrong-headed. Small government is a sitting duck for corporatism. I am reminded of a quote by (I think it was) Vernon Parrington back in the 1800s or early 1900s that said the government needed to be big enough to control corporations but what power prevents the government's power from being taken over by those corporations? Thus the dilemma for small government types. Unless you can eliminate big corporations you've only given Big Money license to eat up the little folk.

As for independent movements and candidates, the US electoral system is rigged in so many ways (and that's a richer topic to be pursued)that it's hard for any group to win at a statewide or national level. I held that Matt Gonzalez would have done better running against Pelosi as San Francisco's representative for the House than tagging along with Ralph Nader on the campaign trail. San Francisco is one of the few places where Pelosi could have been defeated from the left.

I'm not saying that I'm so enamored with the Democratic Party that I would never vote for an independent. When Moscone was murdered, I voted for Jello Biafra (twice) because the alternative was Feinstein. I voted for Dr. Spock in 1980 because when I got off work in California Jimmy Carter had already conceded the election. But I would have voted for Carter because there was a difference, a BIG difference, between Carter and Reagan. I would much rather a Bernie Sanders be California's Senator than Dianne Feinstein. But when November rolls around, do you want a Feinstein or do you want a used car salesman from Orange County who believes in killing gays? Still, if Feinstein has a comfortable lead from the guy from Orange County I'll vote for whoever the Greens are running. As bad as Feinstein is, there is a difference.

But like I've said, analysis of how the Democratic Party got the way it did is more constructive than just wringing hands.

In case you missed it

In case you missed it, I think Luke Mitchell's essay awhile back in Harper's on healthcare reform, "Understanding Obamacare", is a good explication of what just happened in front of our eyes.

In conjunction with Mitchell's essay, I find the anger on the Left at Jane Hamsher for pointing out how badly the current version of healthcare reform sucks sadly familiar. And I expect in a few years the Hamsherites will be resented even more by many Dems in the blogosphere for being right.

My only quibble with Mitchell's piece is that he sees the Democratic Party as usurping the Republican Party's role of actively representing corporations. Which it has. But my guess is that the current link of extruded sausage will be so unpalatable when served to the American working class that the Democratic Party will be left holding the bag and will suffer the consequences.

When this happens, the Dems doing the work of the corporations (see: Bill Clinton, GATT, NAFTA, etc.), you get people searching for alternatives, like teabagging, death-paneling, or Contract-With-America-ing hoaxes, which get enough resonance from reactionary media outlets to put Republicans back into power.

Not that Republicans (or Democrats) are so much in power as much as in a position to serve their corporate owners. Not that all Democrats are exactly equal to all Republicans. I find the Republican brand particularly loathsome and its mythology much too close to the mid-20th Century fascist movements. Those few Democrats on the left (you know, showing some concern to the great unwashed and uninsured), unfortunately, will get tarred for going along with Obama and will get eliminated in future elections, leaving the Ben Nelsons and Max Baucuses, thoroughly protected by corporate money, to march into the future with the Democratic brand name.

So in the name of healthcare reform the Democrats will pass a health insurance bill for insurance companies, get the blame for the predictable consequences, and the Republican obstructionism will be rewarded with yet another Reich.

So it goes.

Democracy at work

this just in, like they used to say...

• 
• 
  
• AP sources: Dems reach deal to drop gov't-run plan (AP)

  AP - After days of secret talks, Senate Democrats tentatively agreed Tuesday night to drop a full-blown government-run insurance option from sweeping health care legislation, several officials said, a concession to party moderates whose votes are critical to passage of President Barack Obama's top domestic priority.

• McChrystal backs Afghan plan to skeptical Congress (AP)
• Militants strike Baghdad govt targets, 127 dead (AP)
• Obama urges major new stimulus, jobs spending (AP)
• Gate-crashers to take the Fifth if subpoenaed (AP)
• Fierce winter storm hits Midwest with snow, wind (AP)

9.12. Now what?

First, the nice young lady above is Lori Harfenist of The Resident. I imagine a lot of people, whether they lived in NYC in 2001 or not, share her view that fretting about conspiracies is redundant, while allowing that a generally corrupt government is likely. I wonder if she actually does look at things that way, given how she characterizes suspicion of the government, and I wonder what she and Bob from Pacifica would make of each other's views.

As you may have noticed, I closed the comments on Rob's 9.10 post, "Riding old 9/11". For now, comments still aren't moderated. I'd prefer to avoid that, and I don't want to have to reprimand anybody, regular visitors especially. I regard all the persons who participated in the previous comments as regular visitors, and feel all are due respect, and need to offer it in kind.

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Bernard Chazelle posted "Everything's a Lie" discussing some the same issues Rob and the commenters touched upon below, in Rob's post.

Here's Chazelle:

But here's the funny thing. People don't seem to mind [i.e.the lying] very much. This is pure Hegelian alienation: the acceptance that some creatures, by virtue of their function status, are normatively alien from us. They may do things (lie, kill, steal) that no one else would be allowed even to consider. Normative is the key word here, because they can't just do anything. They are strict norms of conduct they must abide by. So a senator who steals a stamp may go to jail, but if the same senator pushes for a billion-dollar bill to favor a baby-killing (military) industry that will make him mega-rich once he leaves office, that's fine. He can go on and give speeches about taking on the baby killers. If a president lies about his intern's extracurriculars, he gets impeached. But if he lies about a bogus threat and bombs the crap out of the Sudan, that's OK. So it's not true that anything goes. The modalities of lying have to be accepted. It's what you might call a normative alienation. See the division of labor: they get to lie and the little guy doesn't, but the little guy gets to approve the norms and they don't. This applies not just in politics but across all modes of power.

Here's part of what I wrote over at ATR:

I don't know if Walter Mondale was uniformly honest, I imagine he wasn't. But he was honest about the possibility of raising taxes, and got walloped in '84. Bill Clinton promised everybody that he would be a warm, huggable kind of conservative-- essentially-- and was wildly successful.

I'm lying myself, because that's not what Clinton said in '92, but a more accurate description of how he refashioned himself in '95.
[...]
If regular readers of lefty blogs all sit on their hands and stay out of the 2010 midterms, I'm guessing this will reduce turn-out by 1 or 2 percent at the most. If those same blog readers go and vote for whoever among 3rd party candidates make the ballot-- even if it's libertarians-- then presumably 3rd party candidates might poll at 1.5 to 2.0 percent nationally, instead of 0.5 to 1.0 per cent.

But some liberals would blanch at the thought of doing this, in part out of fear that the TV talking heads would spin it as support for social security privatization. (But most who think of doing it but decide against it, I'd wager, would only stop themselves because of the thought that it might mean the republican might get in or stay in.)

The Liberal Gipper

www.reelectkucinich.com

Avedon Carol: This was not unexpected, and for some time I have felt a certain sadness in knowing that his long fight for healthcare was devolving into the mishmash of betrayal and lies we have now, after everyone made such a big deal of passing healthcare legislation at last "for Teddy", and that he was likely to go out seeing that dream once again becoming a shambles. I also feared that some people who should know better (including, it seemed, Kennedy himself), were pushing too hard for a plan - any plan - just so they could get Obama to sign it before Teddy died.

Well, obviously, if anyone was in a rush to pass the plan so Teddy could see it signed, that urgency is gone, and if any good can come of his passing, I hope it's that they rethink this whole hurry-up-and-wait-for-worse-than-nothing project the Blue Dogs (including, as near as I can tell, Obama himself) have been saddling us with.

Dennis Perrin: You can say a lot of negative things about Ted Kennedy that were true, but the man was as much of a progressive force as this rotten system allows.

Louis Proyect: "Ted Kennedy as New Dealer?"(with thanks to Dennis P. for the link.)
Jimmy Carter on Kennedy in 1979

and Carter on Kennedy in 2009[video]

My mother was in love with the Kennedy mystique, especially with JFK.And while I am close to Dennis Perrin's age, Dennis being similarly impressed with Teddy, I nevertheless have difficulty sharing his enthusiasm, or my late mother's. Dennis rightly notes Carter's rightward tilt, and certainly Carter started some of the unfortunate deregulation that Reagan subsequently kicked into high gear. All the same, I don't think Carter was as ideologically indistinguishable from Reagan as Obama seems compared to McCain-- and I wonder to what degree we have Teddy Kennedy's hubris in staying in the democratic race just past the bitter end to thank for Reagan being elected in 1980.

From my vantage point it seems that a lot of left-wing bloggers who frequently bash Obama, however right they may be in doing so, often have something of a tin ear when it comes to "less-sexy" domestic policy issues. If they praise Kennedy for being to the left of Carter and a "liberal lion", I can't help but think that they fail to see Kennedy's blindness in dealing with Obama and his wretched, poisonous, healthcare plan. The ancient Greeks used to say you could not judge the quality of a man's life until his very last breath. My primitive understanding of Western classical culture being what it is, I think they were talking about the private,personal quality of life the person experienced, as opposed to the person's public character, so it's an ill-fitting metaphor-- but I'll use it.

Yes, Ted Kennedy did some good things, like help foster the COBRA healthcare act, but he himself described universal healthcare as the cause of his life, and if you judge him by what he did to help usher it in towards the end, he blew it pretty badly.

Read his July 18th essay in Newsweek, also entitled "The cause of my life" in which he criticizes Jimmy Carter for what he calls his piecemeal approach in 1980, and says, regarding the current legislative effort, that "Incremental measures won't suffice anymore." But then Kennedy goes on to say he doesn't support a single-payer scheme because he feels it's impractical, and he does support a "public option", as well as individual mandates. (But hey, Carter's approach was piecemeal.)

Kennedy was dying and he knew it, but as far as I can tell he said nothing about the gradual gutting of the legislation over the course of the summer, nor anything about Obama's very public vacillation regarding his support for the public option. I'm not trying to be sarcastic or hurtful by speculating that maybe his cancer influenced his effectively taking a dive for Obama and the blue dogs. Maybe he was too weak at that point, maybe he deteriorated rapidly in the final weeks. Maybe, for that matter, his July op-ed(prepared with Bob Schrum)was "in the can", ready to go for some time, and was more a reflection of the political undercurrent of weeks or even months earlier.

I've already touched upon why I think that individual mandates are a poison pill that will actually make many people's access to healthcare worse and will end up costing us more collectively, but I think I need to flesh it out more next week. For now I want to close by noting the exasperation I feel with sloganeering and catchphrases being used as a substitute for fleshing out the details of how various "reform" proposals might work. You see it on both sides, actually-- whether it's the nuts who think that any sort of healthcare reform offered by democrats is "socialism" to the lock-step progressive-lite liberals who call it "the public option" and may also think it's socialism, albeit approvingly. I'm guessing that substantial people on both sides think the public option actually IS the same as a single-payer scheme.

Politicians and teevee talking heads toss these terms back and forth to obscure policy details and get the dunderheaded troops riled up, and the foot-soldiers of both sides comply, repeating them without questioning. Although some of the right-wing activists seem more in need of anti-psychotic meds then their progressive counterparts, I'm guessing they'd both be angered if somebody told them they were all just stooges for a one-party system.

But now what will happen, with Teddy gone? I avoided the telly today, so I don't know if smart teevee people were soberly chattering about this, as if the whole country didn't know he was dying. But what really makes me want to retch is the inevitable invocations (www.honorkennedy.com. No, really, it's already up.) to "do it for Teddy", i.e., to marshall another handy figure of speech, like socialism or the public option, designed to silence dissent when they sell you a rotten piece of legislation. The expected honoring of his memory may even constitute an opening to water it down further.

As Avedon Carol says, "it's time to junk the whole current proposal and go back to square one. Demand single-payer now, at the very least."

Do it for sick, broke people you've never heard of who are still alive, or simply because you may be one of them someday. If he was this great lion of liberalism that people said he was, you'd think he'd prefer it done for them.

Ray McGovern in Denton

This past Friday Ray McGovern came here to Denton, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to give a lecture about torture and the politicization of the CIA. As you may already know he was in Dallas(Richardson) the day before, and discussed his planning on speaking there in Counterpunch last Thursday. McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who first came to wider prominence when he publicly confronted Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago about his inconsistent statements regarding the likelihood that Saddam had WMDs.

McGovern seems like a nice enough person, but implicit in his spiel, if I'm reading it right , is that Gitmo and Bush II should be regarded as aberrations. He also said that Obama was heroic for releasing the torture memos(!), and that he regarded McNamara as a tragic figure(!!). To his credit he did criticize Panetta for not being sufficiently forthcoming, and noted that the US hasn't stopped torturing post GWB. It may be that he was being diplomatic in praising Obama, per reading his audience on Friday night as party-line rank-and-file dems who couldn't otherwise be reached unless you avoid criticizing Obama. I don't know enough about McGovern to judge. There is no video of the speech he gave here in Denton, but it was very similar to the video of the full speech he gave in Seattle in March(about 56:00, link here) which is what the 7 minute excerpt above is drawn from. At around the 8 minute mark he says "on January 20th we got rid of the Nazis" which he didn't say in Denton but seems in keeping with the tenor of the speech I heard. A goodly portion of his speech, both in the 56 minute link and last week, was about fighting the good fight, etc, etc, and the importance of resistance irrespective of the likelihood of success.

To me, fighting the good fight irrespective of the odds of success in 2008 would've meant, at the very least, voting for a third party candidate like Cynthia McKinney or Nader in order to register discontent with the corrupt prevailing political order. But my sense, sitting in the small crowd of 30-35 or so people who attended, was I surrounded by democratic party faithful, most of whom would have a hard time doing that, even here in solidly red Texas.

My sense also was that McGovern wasn't about to suggest such a strategy to the gathered group. In the brief Q and A at the end of his talk, one lady asked, "what can we do, to show our friends and neighbors who are so preoccupied with religion and believe whatever their preachers tell them about republicans and the war, how they're misguided and show them the...more enlightened view?"

Mine is a very rough paraphrase and I don't know if I'm adequately capturing her sentiment. I wanted to say, "have you tried not voting for pro-war democrats?" but felt that since I was not a regular attendee and hadn't been to one of Peace/Action/Denton's events in several years that it would have been rude. Besides, strictly speaking I don't know how the crowd that was present voted, or even that voting actually matters. Like Ray McGovern I felt they were nice people, even if they may be part of the problem. And if they are, who am I to decide that, let alone tell them?

McNamara, on the other hand, I feel more comfortable rejecting as a "tragic figure". Stephen Walt recently wrote this about him:

Some commentators see McNamara as a tragic figure; a talented, driven, and dedicated public servant who mishandled a foolish war and spent the remainder of his life trying to atone for it. The obituary in today's New York Times takes this line, describing him as having "spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences," and as someone who "wore the expression of a haunted man."

I see his fate differently. Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much tragedy there.

But I agree with McGovern about what he calls the "fawning corporate media", and I note that he encouraged everyone gathered to read the torture memos now that they are available, so here is the address for the ACLU's downloadable PDF of those memos.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Here Comes the New Boss

Stelios Varias,Reuters

A friend who knows my political views asked me: "you're not looking forward to tomorrow, are you?" Referring of course to the ascent of Obama to the presidential throne. Now to be honest, I don't know how I feel about Obama, expressed on a simple level of positive/negative, good/bad, what have you. Unlike Rob Payne, I'm willing to acknowledge that between Obama and McCain, Obama might be marginally preferable, notwithstanding the embarrassment evoked by the contingent who insist on treating him like he can part the sea and persuade the sun to shine.

That's not the same as saying I think he was a desirable choice for president per se, or even for the democratic nomination-- but I'll get to that. This April Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will turn 89, later this year Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 76, and in fact the youngest of the liberal members of the court, Stephen Breyer, will turn 70 in 2009. I would have preferred somebody like Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards had been the president to appoint Stevens's and Ginsberg's replacements, but that was not to be. I note this because it's pretty likely they will retire soon, and with a certain unease I'll nevertheless assert that I prefer Obama rather than McCain(or Palin) be the person to appoint their replacements.

In spite of what I see as the broader reality of Obama's nature as a corporatist quisling, I imagine some modest benefits will emerge from Obama being president rather than McCain. Federal policy on stem-cell research may become sane again, and (possibly) his environmental policies will be better than McCain's would have been. But as far as foreign and economic policy go, I doubt we'll see anything that represents "hope" or "change", with or without ironic quotation marks.

I suppose the thing I find so maddening about the ascendancy of Obama is it comes along at precisely the moment that the broader public was probably readier than they have been in decades for a real liberal reformer in the white house, what with the many missteps of the second George Bush and his cronies. And instead we get Barack Obama, who seems intent on repackaging soak-the-poor and destroy-the-welfare-state politics as the new, new liberalism, the variety you didn't know you wanted until he came along and cleared things up. It seems so abundantly clear to me that he's a fraud, a speaker of pretty words that flatter the ill-informed, and that his bipartisan, "post-ideological" ethos is really just craven opportunism, the positioning of a product-- which in this case is also a person-- in the marketplace of politics so it looks its best in the available light.

And yet, on one side of our screwy political culture we have the Obamazoids who want to flash a victory sign and cheer their new messiah so they can stop thinking and just groove on a warm feeling, and on the other the talk-radio cretins who insist that he's a socialist(?!), possibly because he doesn't want to bomb Ahmedinejad without talking to him first, or because he's never hunted moose from an airplane. Or because he's black.

About that. Although the historical significance of our first black president has been over-sold, I think even people understandably leery of the hype and the cult of Obama need to allow that his election is a sign of social progress, even if you have to qualify it by also recognizing how strenuously Obama bent over backwards to reassure middle America that he was the nice, non-threatening type of black guy, the one that Hollywood leads us to believe will absolve us of our sins in the great shopping mall in the sky.

Another friend tells me to "give him a chance," as if my attitude makes the least bit of difference. While I don't think my attitude towards Obama is remotely relevant, I'm guessing my attitude towards his flock does matter. It's probably vanity to hope to personally change the political landscape for the better, at least in terms of measurable individual effort. But collective effort is the sum of the individuals who try to achieve.....thing x, whatever that thing is, whether it's through the march of a million people or the raising of a hundred million dollars for a cause.

When I saw a news story in October about the Obama organization raising 150 million dollars in 30 days, roughly concurrent with the demise of Cursor, I couldn't help but think about that, about how the flesh is willing, the collective progressive impulse is there, but the collective mind is weak, misdirected by personality-oriented politics. The people at Cursor said all they need is about 75 grand to run for a year,a sum Obama could raise in less than half an hour. And Cursor did more to wake people up to the issues of the day than a hundred celebrity-penned Huffington Post op-eds. Not in terms of audience size, unfortunately, but in terms of the quality and relevance of the content.

But-- also unfortunately-- that clearly isn't enough. I thought about that ironic disconnect again today, when I saw the images of over one million-- and possibly close to two million-- people converging at the mall in D.C. to see Obama become president-- of how the collective progressive impulse is there, but that, functionally, Obama is an agent of (the co-option of) change.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," or so the old saying goes. It may well be true, but making fun of those millions who believe in Obama the savior of America rather than reaching out to them is willful and vain and stupid. Large numbers of them, black and white and otherwise, will experience a letdown when Obama emerges as just another politician, and to borrow from Barack himself, that will be a "teachable moment."

Remind yourself of 2003, and how unlikely George Bush's days with lower ratings than Nixon seemed when he was prancing around on that aircraft carrier. Obama undoubtedly has more sense than Bush Junior, at least as far as permitting himself such an unrestrained display of hubris, but even he has to realize that you can't get an 80 percent approval rating just for being the president-elect without an inevitable falling action being in store. And how much of his current approval is mere approval for his not-George-Bush quality? Even you and I and the cashier at Quiznos possess that same quality, and as far as I know nobody voted for us.

I could say, "naturally I hope I'm wrong about Obama...." largely out of a desire to seem like a reasonable person. Well sure, I do hope I'm wrong, but I think such a hope is insufficient, and the afore-mentioned letdown is coming. And I repeat: simply making fun of the millions who believe in him is unwise, insofar as large numbers of them WILL decide he isn't what they hoped he would be. And then what? Some of them are-- will be-- reachable.

(If anything, I'd guess that a lot of the newly politicized Obamazoids are among the more reachable, because their brains aren't as full of the accomodationist bullshit that so many regular rank-and-file democrats have crammed their craniums with, the kind of folks that Dennis Perrin regularly warns us about.)

In the meantime, liberalism is bleeding in the gutter where it was left by Reagan, and the Clintons, and Fox news, and by the democratic party leadership, and the faux-liberal putative left who eagerly swallow one "third way" capitulation after another, and by the rest of the news networks... and Obama.


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Sanjay Gupta, et al

Recently Avedon Carol wrote, in "Another revolting development:"

I gotta agree with Krugman about the appointment of Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. Anyone who can utter that many conservative lies and talking points about single-payer/"socialized" medicine is, to put it generously, the wrong choice - and looks an awful lot like a signal from Obama that he doesn't give a damn about one of the most vital issues facing us. It's not bad enough that he said before that he doesn't support single-payer, but he clearly hasn't learned anything of value in his long period of running for president. Another "Up yours!" to the people who voted for him thinking he had to be better than this.
[...]
This is the thing that always worries me about Obama - he seems very much a part of that subgroup of people in his age group who fell hook, line, and sinker for the "libertarian" excuses to oppose liberalism, because he doesn't know any better. And unlike a lot of other people in that group, he hasn't learned anything from the last eight years. I have a friend who seems convinced that Obama is the Real Deal because he spoke to him back during his Senate race and learned that Obama really doesn't like Bush - but, really, despising Bush is a pretty low threshold. Not many people ever really liked Bush, anyway. What's important is understanding why the policies are bad, and listening to Obama talk about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, I get the feeling he doesn't really know what was wrong with Iraq, either. Same with healthcare.

[emphases mine.-JV]

This was around the time that Rob Payne and I had a brief discussion in comments about whether or not Obama is a smart fellow. I argued that he was, taking the implicit position that he did know better, i.e., that his hawkish foreign policy related appointments, advocacy of expanding the military and recent wishy-washiness about raising taxes on the wealthy were deliberate choices of easy political choices trumping sound policy. Now I'm thinking I could be wrong and that Rob and Avedon, approaching it from somewhat different angles, could be right.

Huh?

New York Times, December 5th:"Obama Hauls In Record $750 Million for Campaign, With Plenty Left to Spend"

...second-guessing is less likely this time because Mr. Obama won. He has several options for his remaining cash, Mr. Gross said, like transferring it to the Democratic National Committee or another party committee, or rolling it over to his 2012 re-election campaign.

What is not an option for Mr. Obama is to help Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton with paying off the debt from her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But the day before, in Forbes:"Obama's donor list asked to help pay Clinton debt"

By BETH FOUHY


Homer: This is your fault with your non threatening Bobby Sherman-style good looks. No girl could resist your charms.
Barach: This was her choice, Mr. Simpson...
Homer: I'm sorry, I wasn't listening. I was lost in your eyes.

Should you vote? Does it matter? pt 1

1.Noam Chomsky and the "lesser of two evils":



2."He Will Probably End the War" - Obama Rally in WI, via the Veracifier:



I note that The Real News has changed the title of the Chomsky piece. Now it's "Chomsky: In swing states vote Obama without illusions." Another video snippet of their talk with him is here: "Chomsky on the Economy."

As far as the Veracifier piece goes, I can't help but feel a little sad, and think that even though kids are supposed to see things as they are in an unvarnished light, the girl who adds the caveat "probably" is nevertheless apparently enthusiastic about the probable end of the war and the probable savior, even as her qualification suggests that his hemming and hawing has registered with her-- well,probably.

But back to the questions, and Mimi's question from about a week ago-- if you should vote, and if it makes any difference, and how do ordinary people do something about our lumbering, out-of-control empire?

I don't think not voting is a valid option, but I'm not quick to put down people who don't vote. Sure, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's contentment, in some quarters. But I imagine for many non-voters it's the sense that US Democracy is an incredibly extravagant dog-and-pony show, and who ends up winning is unlikely to matter terribly much. Is that so easy to refute?

Cheerful boos for Hillary

At the YearlyKos convention, the mixed reception for Hillary Clinton is more evidence that the liberal blogosphere might not take sides in the coming Democratic primary.

Michael Scherer, Salon, 6 Aug 2007:

The only candidate who was booed louder than Clinton at Saturday's presidential debate was the unlikely left-winger Dennis Kucinich. He made the mistake of aping one-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who regularly attacked the Democratic leadership as a bunch of sellouts. "Why don't people vote?" Kucinich asked, rhetorically. "It's because they don't think there is much of a difference between the two parties." The booing immediately drowned Kucinich out. He had committed a cardinal sin, demeaning the Democratic Party before a crowd that works countless unpaid hours a week to make the party stronger. He had also provided, inadvertently, another reason for Clinton to smile. The YearlyKos community may not be her most natural constituency, but it is also unlikely to be her enemy.

more recently, Xymphora writes:
A very big Republican loss would be very good for the United States, not because the Democrats will be much better (they won't), but because it will entail a complete reevaluation by the old-school Republicans of the fundamental nature of their party, and the forced removal of the Christian fruitcakes from mainstream American politics.

more later.

I want to believe-- hey, who doesn't?

As Rob very correctly pointed out in the previous post, "Hollow Victory,"
I responded to Mimi's question in the comments but did not really address it. Later I was looking for visual aids using the image search of "Obama+gestalt" when I came across this NYU survey regarding the '08 election, which might interest you. I will post more regarding Mimi's question shortly.



it's clickable...

Perhaps Brad DeLong is Mostly Wrong

Yesterday Salon offered this Brad De Long(also here) essay:

Why Ben and Hank are right, mostly

Our economic system is indeed on the verge of a serious meltdown, but lawmakers should not grant Bernanke and Paulson the far-reaching powers they call for in their plan.

By Brad DeLong [2008-09-25]

I responded:

Perhaps Brad is wrong, mostly

I'm sorry, but Dr. DeLong's apologia for buccaneer capitalism is highly suspect.

Brad, if I may also be so forward, you write:

1."The high level of market risk and its rapid run-up from normal levels only a year ago last August means death to all banks, and near-banks, and shadow-banks, and banklike institutions -- unless the economic fever is broken and is broken soon."

All banks? Really? All banks? Come on. Several key, high profile firms, sure. Morgan Stanley, among the ones presently in trouble, survived the depression without this kind of intervention, as did others. Maybe Morgan Stanley won't make it this time, but others will. They are still needed, and some smaller, hitherto unheralded, more soundly capitalized banks will inevitably fill the void created by a few marquee names going bust.

Possibly this would occur more slowly than Bernanke and Paulson might care for, because of the understandable reluctance to be incautious that the survivor institutions would have. But that reluctance is good for the economy in the long term, and the recovery would happen, the market correcting the recklessness of corrupt lawmakers who helped create the conditions that allowed the present state of affairs to come to pass.

2."The game that Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson are playing right now is an extremely tricky one: try to keep the banking system from freezing up; try to restore risk perceptions to normal levels; try to keep finance flowing so that we have a peak level of only 8 million unemployed in America next year, rather than 15 million or more..."

If the goal is to prop up the economy and reduce the suffering and anxiety of ordinary people, aren't there numerous better ways to spend 700 billion dollars we don't actually have?

If you just gave 7 million people 700 billion dollars, say, over the course of three years, specifically targeting the populations most likely to lose their jobs using your math of going from an apparently acceptable(?!) 8 million to 15 million out of work, that could work out to paying 7 million people a stipend of about 33 thousand a year for three years.

Award this stipend only to people who've lost their jobs, or have averaged less than 18 thousand a year income for the past three years. I'll bet they'd spend it, helping out retailers, and some would even start catching up on their debts. And some would go to school and get educated, so they could help with the transition to a more modern workforce that you discuss. Wouldn't that help the economy a hell of a lot more?

Or how about tax credits for homebuilders who construct new homes with solar panels, especially in sunnier climes like the southwestern states. And maybe even an aggressive public works program, fixing bad roads, and unsafe bridges, and inadequate levees.

And yes, Brad, I know what you're thinking: how would we pay for such programs?

How indeed?

Why do you blithely assert that we can pay for the bank bailout by shouldering more debt, to fix an unsound situation created through excessively leveraged loans, without pausing to consider the danger of excessively leveraging the debt of the government and the taxpayers?

I'm not nearly so versed in the ways of markets as you are Brad, but I remember that Bill Clinton increased taxes on people who made over 200 grand in 1993, and the economy boomed for several years. Was that so long ago?

3.So I propose we pay for any economic stimulus or partial bailout by freezing the tax rates on lower and median incomes, making capital gains taxable as regular income, and increasing taxes on those earning over 500 grand.

What do you think, Brad?

***
My sense tells me that when all the smart people on the television on "both sides" of the spectrum, and the celebrity press, all get together to tell us this is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed now, now , NOW... that we are being sold something that's probably far more toxic than the thing it's ostensibly meant to cure. I also think that Paulson may have deliberately overplayed his initial gambit as part of a "good cop-bad cop" shtick that's designed to make a subsequent "compromise" appear reasonable. But maybe that's just me.