Category: Social and Economic Justice

By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Yesterday, conservative commentator George Will called Barack Obama a “timid progressive.”

Will is an interesting writer. He’s far more thoughtful and articulate than the bloviators who dominate the talk channels, and he will criticize both the Right and the Left as he sees fit. I’ve often said that one of my secret fantasies is to be “a George Will of the Left.”

And I’d agree with him about Obama’s timidity. Obama talks a big, bold line, but when it comes to action, his moves are for the most part tiny little reforms, and even those don’t get pushed very hard for the most part. Obama was pretty progressive a few years ago, but his term in the Senate and his desire to be President seemed to have cooled his ardor. By the time he was elected, I figured he was a mainstream liberal, somewhere to the right of Ted Kennedy but well to the left of any recent occupant of the Oval Office.

Still, although my expectations for Obama’s presidency were pretty low, they haven’t even come close to being reached. On the timidity factor, he’s drowning the hopes of his mandate in the bathtub of timidity. I appreciate Obama’s conciliatory approach—but there’s a difference he doesn’t understand between trying to make common cause with the other side and walking away when it’s obvious the other side doesn’t care, doesn’t want to be engaged, and will do everything in its power to sabotage you.

Why do I say Obama’s not progressive anymore?
This is what a progressive agenda would have looked like:

  • Health care: Medicare for All, a one-paragraph or at most one-page unamendable document that would have galvanized support, been hard to attack, and would have passed easily, months ago, with none of the backroom dealing that gave so much leverage to people like Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe.
  • Foreign policy: Rapid withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan (three to six months). Strong condemnation of the Iraq venture as an illegal war waged under utterly false pretenses. Immediate halt on torture, rapid closing of Guantanamo, some sort of legal proceedings (perhaps a Nelson Mandela-style Commission on Truth and Reconciliation) to hold the Bush administration accountable for the rogue state we had become. An indelible message to Israel that its actions in Gaza were unacceptable and would have consequences for US support, insistence on a settlement freeze, and pressure on the Palestinian Authority to both crack down on terrorists and to negotiate in good faith.
  • Domestic policy: Consequences and safeguards around the Wall Street bailout that held the banks and brokerage firms accountable and prevented large bonuses going to executives of failing companies. Economic measures in addition to TARP that addressed working-class and middle-class Americans, especially in the areas of foreclosure and Main Street business help. A Marshall Plan-size effort to move off oil/coal and replace fossil fuels with true renewables (nuclear emphatically doesn’t count).

    • Energy is one area where Obama did make a start, at least. The appointment of Van Jones and the attention to Green jobs were laudable, but Jones was quickly kicked out under pressure from the Right, and the momentum for Green jobs withered.

    Timidity: George Will Was Right
    The other big problem was that not only did his agenda lack real progressive substance for the most part, but he hasn’t been willing to use his considerable persuasive powers to retain his support base and pressure Congress. Nor is he able to simply hold the Democratic Party together long enough to move change forward. The lack of 60 reliable votes in the Senate is a red herring; during the few months he had the supermajority, the Democrats still couldn’t get much done. Look at the GW Bush administration, which never head anything like 60 votes, whose election legitimacy was never certain, and which generated significant public opposition to many of its policies. Bush was still was able to ram through all kinds of things, many of which the country has lived to regret.

    From a marketing and PR point of view, Obama could have taken a leaf from Franklin Roosevelt’s book: When Roosevelt couldn’t get things through Congress, he turned to the people; he appealed directly to voters. He used Republican intransigence to build up pressure, and then at election time, was able to replace some of the obstacles. For the last year, Obama has totally blown the opportunity to blame the mess both on the past administration and on the unwillingness of Republicans to let him through to make the change he promised during the campaign. If he had used different strategy, 2010 should have seen a sweeping housecleaning in the House and Senate and a vast Democratic majority in place for the next two years. Instead, I think Obama’s cushion will be a lot thinner, and he’ll have even less room to work. The result will be a one-term presidency with meager accomplishments, and probably another round of Republican aggression.

    The last Democrat who was willing to use some muscle to move his agenda forward (an agenda that was not at all popular in large sections of the country) was Lyndon Johnson. From his grave, LBJ must be wondering why Obama is afraid to lead.

    Of course, the Left hasn’t had Obama’s back. We’ve given the streets to the tea partiers, where we should have been out there putting pressure on of our own (for example, not letting a health care bill move forward that doesn’t even have a public option, let alone single-payer/Medicare for All), and marshaling support for the few progressive initiatives.

    Obama has eight more months to change the dynamic. Eight months in which he needs to start being very public about why change is not emanating through Congress. Eight months to appeal to the American people for support, and to get winnable candidates in place to challenge the intransigents. I wish him luck.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

    An article with that headline appeared the other day in Firedog Lake and was reprinted in Common Dreams

    The writer, Cenk Uygur, believes Obama is good-hearted and sincerely wants change, but that he feels powerless.

    Why? Because not only doesn’t the left get out there and make noise, and push the discourse overwhelmingly toward real change (as the right has done so horribly effectively for a few decades now)—but we don’t even “have his back” for the moderate changes he could have fought for. Of course, he hasn’t fought very hard, and he was careful to appoint Cabinet members who for the most part were not visionaries, were not even change agents, but were part and parcel of the status quo, some of them the same people who brought the economy crashing down and got us into illegal and immoral wars in the first place.

    Here are a few (non-contiguous) paragraphs from the article:

    So, what Obama does by his nature is find the middle ground. As an excellent innate politician, he will find the political center of any field and rush to it. That’s where elections are won – the center.
    So, that’s why he sounded so progressive during the primaries, because that was the center of the left. And why he sounded like such a reformer during the general election because the great majority of Americans desperately wanted change…

    The center of Washington is very different than the center of the country. The Washington bubble leans far more to the right than the rest of the country (poll after poll indicates this). The corporate media in Washington are pros at protecting the status quo and view people who challenge the system as fringe players…

    So, our only hope is to move the island. We have to move his center. If we can move what he perceives to be the center, he will naturally flow to it. In Lost, when they move the island they move across time. In our case, when we move the island we need to move across the political spectrum.

    Right now, Obama perceives the center of the country to be somewhere between Dick Cheney and Harry Reid. Do you know where that leaves him? Joe Lieberman. That’s why we’re in the sorry shape we’re in now.

    Although it has a lot of gangster and violence metaphors that I don’t like and don’t agree with, the whole article is worth reading. And Uygur’s central thesis is absolutely on target: that it’s up to us to create a people’s movement that demands the change we elected Obama to bring, and that movement has to be loud and forceful and convincg—to the media, to the American people, and to the politicians.

    Change historically comes not from politicians, but by the people who demand it from them. The Civil Rights movement gave Lyndon Johnson (no progressive) room to push through several major pieces of Civil Rights legislation. Earth Day and the environmental movement of the early ’70s gave Richard Nixon (not a progressive bone in his body!) a mandate for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. yet we on the left (and I include myself in that) have largely stood by while Clinton negotiated away health care and the rights of gays in the military, while Bush and Cheney stole the election and hijacked the country, and while Obama rolls the ball ever-rightward to pass something he can pathetically call health care reform, or climate change objectives, or any of the rest of it. Let’s “have Obama’s back” for standing his ground against the right, and let’s push him further to the left with public pressure. Lots of it.

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    By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

    1. Have you heard about the barbaric, fascistic anti-homosexuality law in Uganda? Yes, they’re calling for the death penalty for consensual sex. Read CNN’s article. Here’s the group to oppose it, please join.

    2. Especially if you’re in Western Mass, but even if you’re not: a Facebook support group has sprung up for the Northampton, Massachusetts victims of arson. My old neighborhood in Northampton got hit with dozens of fires in a one-hour period Sunday night. Two people died, and two families including some friends of ours were left homeless. Several lost their cars or sustained severe damage.

    Please distribute this message widely.

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    By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with ,

    Spend 12 minutes listening to the best commentary I’ve heard on the healthcare mess, from MS-NBC’s Keith Olbermann.

    He is the only other person I’ve heard advocating my viewpoint: that since compromise isn’t working anyway, since the right-wing nutters will call you a socialist no matter what you do, you may as well fight for what we really need, and then in the next elections call down the progressive forces to sweep out the GOP and BlueDog intransigents, along with the ever-more-loathsome Joe Lieberman. Letting the bill go down in flames and then bringing it back as a campaign tool is a far more sensible strategy to me than chipping and chipping away at the reforms until there’s nothing left other than total capitulation to the insurance industry. This bill embodies everything wrong about the legislative process: the influence of big lobbying and big campaign money, the people shut out from the beginning, even Sanders being forced to abandon the single-payer vote on a parliamentary procedure trick.

    Like Olbermann, and like Howard Dean, if I were in the Senate, I’d be voting no until there are some crumbs in here for ordinary Americans. First Obama and Baucus rejected single-payer—what we really want and NEED—in favor of the very limited “public option.” Then they traded that away for extension of Medicare. Then they traded THAT away…for what? For the unreliable promise of a possible (not definite) yes vote from Lieberman!

    Progressive Senators like Sanders and a few others need to tell Obama and Ried tht this bill is not one they can vote for. Let the bill grind to a halt! We can play this kind of hardball as well. When there’s nothing to vote for, it’s time to vote no.

    I’ll be urging my own Senators to do so later today. Not in a petition but in a personal letter. When I’ve done the letter, I’ll post it here, and I give open permission to copy it in whole or in part to contact your own Senators.

    I’m also going to ask MSNBC for a transcript of Olbermann’s remarks, and permission to post it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

    Just stumbled on this article from a few months back. Never afraid to be controversial, the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) examined the boards of directors of nine major media companies–and found that some of those directors also sit on boards governing health insurance companies. Media properties with interlocking directors with the insurance industry included the Washington Post, Gannett (publishers of USA Today and other papers), NBC, and several others.

    Hmmmm, wonders FAIR, might this conjunction have something to do with the refusal to discuss single-payer/Medicare for all (the standard for health care in most of the developed world) in any meaningful way?

    In the past six months, the Washington Post has published hundreds of articles on the subject of healthcare reform, fewer than 25 of which mention single-payer. Fewer than 30 percent of the sources who spoke about single-payer in these articles were advocates of the plan. In all, though healthcare reform has been mentioned thousands of times in the output of these media corporations’ major outlets, single-payer was mentioned in only 164 articles or news segments from January 1 through June 30, 2009; over 70 percent of these mentions did not include the voice of a single-payer advocate. Over 45 percent of the pieces that did include a single-payer advocate were episodes of the Ed Show, an MSNBC program whose host, Ed Shultz, frequently advocates for single-payer healthcare. Without the Ed Show, just 19 percent of articles or news segments that mentioned single-payer would have included an actual advocate of the plan.

    I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

    This just in: Proponents of single-payer health care, a/k/a Medicare for All–the system used by almost every developed country in the world–will not get our promised floor vote after all.

    If I were in Congress right now, I’d vote no. The bill has gotten weaker, more complicated, and more expensive with every turn. As I understand it, it is a giveaway to big insurers and might actually leave fewer people insured than we have now. A travesty!

    President Obama–WHERE is the “change” you promised so loudly one year ago? As The Who sang in my very favorite song, “We Don’t Get Fooled Again,” “Meet the new boss…same as the old boss.”

    Below is the public statement from Physicians for a National Health Program

    November 6, 2009

    Dear PNHP colleagues and friends,

    We are disappointed to report that there will not be a vote on the Weiner amendment for single payer today in advance of the vote on the House bill tomorrow.

    Two reasons were given by Rep. Weiner for withdrawing his amendment:

    1. Speaker Pelosi said if she allowed debate on the single-payer amendment, she would have to allow debate on an expansion of the Hyde anti-abortion amendment, which the Democrats do not wish to do, and

    2. There are at least 8 members who would vote against the House bill if they were given a chance to vote for Weiner’s single-payer amendment. At this point the Democratic leadership is desperately counting votes; they can only afford to lose 15 votes total, and according to the Washington Post, they are currently down by 25 votes.

    Next steps and interpretation –

    1. The fact that single payer got so far along in the House is a testament to the strength of our single-payer movement. The huge number of calls by single-payer advocates in support of single payer and the Weiner amendment in recent weeks have been noted by several members of Congress. Increasingly the public is learning what Harvard health economist William Hsiao told the New York Times, that “< #taiwan>[y]ou can have universal coverage and good quality health care while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.”

    2. It appears that nobody, particularly President Obama, expected our single-payer option to be alive in the Congress for so long. As you know, they attempted to keep it “off the table” from the very beginning.

    3. The president was directly involved in the decision to not hold a vote on the Weiner single-payer amendment, and Weiner will be meeting with him later today. Stay tuned.

    4. We need to increase pressure on the Congress and White House for Medicare for All through lobbying, speaking engagements, media outreach, grassroots organizing and civil disobedience. Senator Bernie Sanders will call for a vote on single payer in the Senate – this could come up anytime in the next month. Encourage your senator to support the Sanders bill (S. 703) and also an amendment he will offer for a state single-payer option. Our friends in the California Nurses Association/NNOC have already started lobbying visits to the Senate in D.C. Lobbying materials, slides, and other materials from our spectacular Annual Meeting in Cambridge are now on-line at www.pnhp.org/annual-meeting-2009

    5. In the national office we are working on press outreach regarding uninsured veterans (we’ll have a release for you early next week on this) and civil disobedience by physicians in support of Medicare for All (see press release, below). Members are encouraged to continue to publish op-eds, letters to the editor, and articles in support of single payer (see articles in today’s Asheville, (N.C) Citizen-Times and the Palm Beach Post, below).

    6. We have been asked how to tell members to vote on the House bill. Our response is that the bill “is like aspirin for breast cancer”. As noted by PNHP Past President Dr. John Geyman in his latest blog post “No bill is better than a bad bill,” even the public option in the House bill is a sham.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Horace Mann, founding President of Antioch College, famously said “Be ashamed to die until you have won one victory for humanity.” Neither Nicholas Negroponte nor Iqbal Quadir will ever have to worry about shaming themselves in front of Horace Mann’s ghost.

    These two M.I.T. professors have both made substantial contributions in developing countries, bringing life-changing technology to villages that don’t even have electricity or running water.

    Negroponte is the key mover behind One Laptop Per Child, an initiative to develop and distribute rugged but cheap (like $100 per unit) laptops to school children, in 18 countries so far. Quadir convinced Bangladeshi microlending pioneer Grameen Bank (founded by Mohammad Yunnis, who received the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts) to underwrite Grameenphone, a business providing cell phone services to villages with no telephone at all.

    Both men spoke at a panel during the Boston Book Fair, coincidentally on Climate Action Day, October 24, 2009. And both have had a major impact.

    Negroponte’s rugged, lightweight laptops can be thrown or dropped with no bad consequence, use only three watts of power (he’s aiming for just one watt on a forthcoming redesign), and both the battery and the computer are designed to last at least five years—about double the typical laptop lifespan—and to minimize waste impact when they are finally past their useful life and life extensions such as use as a TV. With no electricity grid, they’re recharged with hand-cranks, solar photovoltaics, or car batteries.

    Each laptop comes preloaded with not only productivity software, but also 100 books whose creators have agreed to make their content available. That means that if a village receives 100 laptops, it suddenly has a library of 10,000 titles (a larger collection than many small-town physical libraries in the United States).

    These computers are designed directly to foster social change: newly literate school children use satellite wi-fi to access the Internet, learn literacy as well as research skills, and even teach their parents to read. For many of these kids, their first English word is “Google.”

    In October, 2009, Uruguay became the first country to get these laptops into the hands of every single school child; Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Peru are among the other countries with a program. Negroponte would love to “take one day of [the cost of war in] Iraq and Afghanistan and do the children in those countries.” In Afghanistan, where many girls are prevented from going to school, the plan he has worked out with the Afghani Minister of Education is to seed the laptops first to girls, so they can learn outside of the classrooms they’re not allowed to attend.

    But his vision is much grander: “It would take $30 billion to do every kid in the world. We gave away more than twice that much to AIG.”

    Grameen Phone     uses a very different business model: funding new small businesses through microlending, and then changing the society as that business rewrites the entire village culture. “Connectivity is productivity,” says Quadir.

    In 1993, there was one (land-line) telephone for every 500 Bangladeshis, and 73 percent for the phones were in Dhaka, the capital. Grameen came in and began lending small amounts of capital to entrepreneurs, who provided and operated a village telephone, where residents could rent time whenever they needed to make a call, and paid back the loans out of profits.

    The benefits are “inclusive, egalitarian, and immediate,” and the results are astounding. Each 10 percent increase in cell phone penetration corresponds with a .8 percent increase in the country’s Gross Domestic Product. By 2005, the company had 250,000 retailers, 22 million subscribers, and 50 million cell phones (many of them smart phones that bring computing power to these remote villages). It expects to have 5 billion phones in place by 2015, which will be near-total penetration of the population.

    Yet the magnitude of change from this initiative may not even be apparent for some time. Rural electrification in the U.S., says Quadir, didn’t happen immediately after the development of electrical utilities. It went to rural areas decades later, when refrigeration made it possible for farmers to store food much longer, and therefore shift perishable food production and distribution from regionally to nationally based.

    Telephone service, he says, is “the low-hanging fruit. From the juice of the low-hanging fruit, you get the energy you need to climb the tree and take the higher fruit.”

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

    Talk about death panels! Physicians for a National Health Program is calling attention to a just releases–and very shocking–Harvard study that found…

    Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.

    The new study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” appears in today’s online edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

    The Harvard-based researchers found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

    In an e-mail blast, the doctors group calls for President Obama to “start from scratch”: to ditch the unpopular, badly thought out, solves-nothing proposals floating through Congress and bring the US into alignment with the rest of the developed world: a single-payer health care plan.

    And the group’s leader, Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., M.P.H. of Harvard University, gave a great interview on this on Democracy Now.

    Retired Senator (and former presidential candidate) George McGovern notes in a recent op-ed that all it would take is a one sentence law, extending Medicare coverage to all Americans.

    I think all these folks are correct. I’ve been saying for months that the time for single-payer (something I started supporting in 1979, when I was a community organizer for the Gray Panthers and this was their main plank) is NOW.

    If you’re in the US, tell your Senators and Congressional representative. And tell your state government to push for it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

    I may get smeared for this as Van Jones was, but let me say that I find it disgraceful that Van Jones was the target of a smear campaign and was forced out as Obama’s Green jobs person. He was one of the few genuine progressive voices in a sea of “moderate-centrists” who would have been considered quite far to the right a few decades back.

    What were Jones’ “crimes”?

    * He called for an investigation into possible government foreknowledge about 9/11. It’s pretty clear that elements within the U.S. government had advance knowledge that something was brewing (even George W. Bush was briefed on this the month before the attack, as Condoleezza Rice admitted in her May 19, 2004 testimony in front of the 9/11 investigation commission), and many respected scholars such as David Ray Griffin have widely circulated hypotheses of U.S. government involvement. My own view is that the U.S. saw the attack coming and decided for its own purposes to let the attack occur (our Reichstag fire, if you will)–but were not directly involved. Why is it unreasonable to ask for an investigation?

    * He used an unfortunate metaphor to describe his radicalization in the aftermath of the acquittal verdict in the Rodney King beating case:

    By August, I was a Communist,” he says in the article, describing his sense of radicalization at the time.

    * He said that Republican strong-arm legislators who managed to force through legislation even when short of a super-majority in the Senate were “assholes.” How is this any worse than commentator Glenn Beck, who led the charge against Jones, calling Obama a racist, or
    George W. Bush, when he was Governor of Texas, threatening a legislator with “I’m going to kick your butt if you don’t go along with me.”. And if you listen to it in context, the subtext was that Democrats are too gentlemanly to play this kind of hardball, and that’s why they can’t get their agenda enacted. This, unfortunately, is patently obvious to observers of the current political scene.

    Glenn Beck, this is the latest in a long line of despicable things you’ve done. You may feel smug now, but you’re the one whose conscience will bother you–not Van Jones.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical is a sweeping, 144-page document addressing and interlocking a wide range of social issues. He calls on the financial industry to tame its greed and turn to ethics, asks the United Nations and individual governments to address deep-rooted poverty issues–not only from economic development perspectives but also making sure these countries have a voice and a seat at the table of power–a political shift, in other words.

    Good coverage in the Washington Post (see above link). And a shoutout to Allan Holender of the World Wide Association of Zentrepreneurs, for bringing this important document to my attention.

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