OurFuture.org Blogs: Terrance Heath

Easy Choices

Terrance Heath — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:23:28 -0800

The first time I heard it, I did a double-take, because I thought I heard it wrong. The second time I heard it, I rolled my eyes. The third time I heard Sarah Palin, in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, suggest that women who choose to terminate pregnancies are essentially "taking the easy way out."

There is much — so much, really — that I object to here, but I'll start with one really simple point.

I don't know, and can't know, what it's like to decide whether or not to have an abortion. But I can listen — and have listened — to the voices and experiences of women who have. None of the women I've known who have faced that choice, based on what they told me, experienced it as an "easy" choice.

Such choices — the ones that have unknown and unknowable, long-term consequences for ourselves and our families — are almost never easy choices to make. As both Republicans and Democrats demonstrate, it's the choices we make for other people — people who are not "us" — that are the easy choices.

Palin's remarks on Oprah virtually echoed what she said earlier this year, in a speech at a fundraising dinner.

The Alaska governor told the Vanderburgh County Right to Life banquet, billed as the largest annual event of its kind, that she learned she was pregnant with her fifth child while on an out-of-state trip at an oil and gas conference.

"There, just for a fleeting moment, I thought, I knew, nobody knows me here. Nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy. It could be easy to think maybe of trying to change the circumstances. . . . No one would ever know."

Palin was 44 years old with four children already. Less than a year into her tenure as governor, she had trouble imagining "putting down the BlackBerry and picking up the breast pump," AOL.com reported.

It was her faith, she said, that made her realize that ending her pregnancy "wasn't any answer." But she said the experience helped her relate to the many women and girls who face unwanted pregnancies.

"I do understand what these women, what these girls go through in that thought process," she told the crowd, who gave her two standing ovations during her remarks.

On the same day of Palin's sit-down with Oprah, I read Emily Douglas' column about Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-MI) amendment to the House health care reform bill.

"That's the price of healthcare reform." That's what plenty of oh-so-well-meaning pundits have told those of us making a fuss over the Stupak amendment, the late-night attachment to the House healthcare reform bill that will leave virtually any woman accessing insurance through the health insurance exchange without abortion coverage. (Another argument that's cropped up is that the Stupak amendment won't actually affect abortion access for that many women, a claim that's based on faulty analysis of Guttmacher data on billing for abortion care, as Adam Sonfield explains.)

But both pro-choice and progressive healthcare reform leaders and members of Congress have come out swinging against the amendment, some going as far as to make it clear they'll refuse to support reform if Congressional Democrats decide to pay for it with women's healthcare. Calling the amendment a "middle-class abortion ban," Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said Wednesday that her organization would not support healthcare reform with an amendment further limiting access to abortion. Meanwhile, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Diane Feinstein have begun strategizing how to keep Stupak off the Senate bill, the New York Times reports.

I'll say it again. Whether it's Sarah Palin's self-serving contradictions, or Democrats' and Republicans' cynical political compromises, in the realm of politics, the choices we make for others are the truly easy choices.

Predictably, it's easy for Sarah Palin to say that women facing unplanned or unwanted pregnancies shouldn't take "easy way" out of their circumstances, with no apparent consideration of the full context of the circumstances in which women make these decisions — deeply personal circumstances that are easy to exploit politically, when decisions are made about policies that make those already difficult circumstances even moreso.

By the same token, it's easy for Rep. Stupak to say that his amendment essentially does nothing and changes nothing and then, without a sense of irony, go on to make the case for its necessity and blame progressives for making it necessary in the first place. (It's worth nothing that the Stupack amendment doesn't quite do everything Stupak initially wanted it to distinguish between "forcible rape" and, well, the other kind I guess.) It's easy for Stupak to ignore that both recent academic reports and health insurance executives say that his amendment will limit access to abortion. services.

Because, though it would initially be limited to those women covered by health care exchanges, in all likelihood insurance companies will gradually stop covering abortion services themselves.

"I really think it would be impractical," says Robert Laszewski, a health insurance industry consultant. Several health insurance companies contacted for this story declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the subject matter.

Laszewski says the problem is that by all estimates, the vast majority of people who will be shopping in the new exchanges will be getting subsidies, so they won't be allowed to get abortion coverage. Thus, if a health insurer did offer a separate plan with abortion coverage, it would only be available to a small universe of buyers, and it simply wouldn't make much business sense.

"It's not an ideological issue, it's not about abortion or not abortion," Laszewski says. "It's about what is administratively simpler, easier to administer. It just adds a level of complexity they will likely avoid."

Sara Rosenbaum, a health lawyer and professor at George Washington University, agrees that it's impractical to expect health insurance plans to cover abortion in the exchanges, even for people paying the full premiums without federal help.

"If you speak to insurers in the industry, they will tell you that they simply can't operate under these circumstances," Rosenbaum says. "They need to be able to offer standard products that get administered in a standard way for everybody."

And that's also the death knell for the supplemental policies Stupak points to as evidence of how little his amendment (which, nonetheless, he says must be in the final health reform legislation) actually does.

"As a result, Stupak/Pitts can be expected to move the industry away from current norms of coverage for medically indicated abortions. In combination with the Hyde Amendment, Stupak/Pitts will impose a coverage exclusion for medically indicated abortions on such a widespread basis that the health benefit services industry can be expected to recalibrate product design downward across the board in order to accommodate the exclusion in selected markets."

Furthermore the study finds that the supposed fallback option for impacted women--a "rider" policy that provides supplemental coverage for abortions only--may not even be allowed under the terms of the law. "In our view, the terms and impact of the Amendment will work to defeat the development of a supplemental coverage market for medically indicated abortions. In any supplemental coverage arrangement, it is essential that the supplemental coverage be administered in conjunction with basic coverage. This intertwined administration approach is barred under Stupak/Pitts because of the prohibition against financial comingling."

Again, Stupak's and Palin's political choices are easy choices, because they deny or simply ignore the circumstances of those "others" who will bear the consequences.

§§§

It would seem like a lot to ignore, but they make it appear quite easy.

In the aftermath of Dr. George Tiller's murder, a lot of people writing about his murder in the context of the increasingly angry rhetoric of the extreme right. But I found myself drawn into the story of why Tiller chose to continue his father's practice of offering abortion services to women, and eventually ended up writing a series of posts about Tiller's medical practice as a matter of conscience. I had written previously about late-term abortion, and the reasons why some women seek abortion services.

The stories goes that when his father, who was also a physician died, Tiller took over his father's practice, intending to phase it out and pursue the dermatology practice he'd wanted to start after medical school. But in the process of taking over his father's practice, he learned that his father had performed abortions during the 50s and 60s (illegal, in those pre-Roe v. Wade days), prompted by guilt over the death of a woman he'd refused to help. Tiller spoke with a number of his father's patients, and learned from them how much his father's services meant at a time when their options were much fewer.

And just as offering abortion services became a matter of conscience for his father, so it became for George Tiller, who would become one of a handful of doctors offering late-term abortion services. He was one of a handful because few doctors, hospitals or medical schools wanted to deal with the threats and violence that inevitably came with the territory.

The result is that threats and violence curtail the availability of abortion services, to the point that there was no one willing to help the 9-year-old girl who was one of Tiller's patients.

The 9-year-old girl had been raped by her father. She was 18 weeks pregnant. Carrying the baby to term, going through labor and delivery, would have ripped her small body apart.

There was no doctor in her rural Southern town to provide her with an abortion. No area hospital would even consider taking her case.

Susan Hill, the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation, which operates reproductive health clinics in areas where abortion services are scarce or nonexisistent, called Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita, Kan., ob-gyn who last Sunday was shot to death by an abortion foe in the entry foyer of his church.

She begged.

“I only asked him for a favor when it was a really desperate story, not a semi-desperate story,” she told me this week. Tiller was known to abortion providers — and opponents — as the “doctor of last resort” — the one who took the patients no one else would touch.

“He took her for free,” she said. “He kept her three days. He checked her himself every few hours. She and her sister came back to me and said he couldn’t have been more wonderful. That’s just the way he was.”

After reading about a the death of 12-year-old girl after a painful childbirth — in Yemen, where abortion is illegal except to save a woman's life, and then only if the mother's death is imminent — I can only imagine the fate of this 9-year-old girl if Tiller had refused to help her as other doctors and hospitals had done.

How’s that? Why was there no physician in her rural southern town who could or would help her? Why would no area hospital — where people would surely have known the risks this young girl (no doubt already traumatized by being raped by her father) would face during delivery? (Vaginal or c-section, it seems like there are no good choices here.)

Why is abortion not readily available in 87% of counties in the U.S.? Why, between 1992 and 2005, did more than 250 hospitals and 300 private practitioners stop providing abortion? Why do so few medical schools train doctors to do these procedures? Why do 74% of ob-gyn residency programs no train all residents in abortion procedures? (Figures via The Gutmacher Institute.)

Why would a nine-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by her father, have nowhere to turn except to Dr. Tiller, and then 18 weeks into pregnancy? (Where will others like her turn now that there’s one less doctor willing to help? It’s likely that, because of all of the above, her pregnancy went on that long because of the time it took for someone willing to help her?

Why was no one willing to help her?

...What hospital or doctor wants to face thousands of protestors, not to mention shootings, bombings, and other violence? What doctor wants to risk his or her life, and take a chance of being added to the list of physicians murdered to help a nine-year-old girl in those circumstances? After all, no protestors will show up if she’s turned away, no headlines will be printed, no television vans will show up, and neither will bombers and gunmen.

She might very well have died, just as the 12-year-old Yemeni girl, in a long and painful childbirth that ended up killing the fetus as well. If she had died, it would not only have been because she was impregnated by the father who raped her, but also because refusing to help her became the easy choice. After all, there are fewer consequences for saying no to a pregnant nine-year-old. perhaps several hundred or even thousands fewere, depending on how many protesters show up in response to saying "yes" to a pregnant, 9-year-old rape victim.

Yemen, by the way, is among those countries that have seen a rise in abortions in the Middle East.

Despite legal and religious restrictions against abortion in much of the Arab world, changing social values and economic realities as well as demographic shifts have contributed to an apparent increase in the number of the procedures in the Middle East.

"There's definitely an increase compared to 10 to 15 years ago," said Mohammed Graigaa, executive director of the Moroccan Assn. for Family Planning. "Abortion is much less of a taboo. It's much more visible. Doctors talk about it. Women talk about it. The moral values of people have changed."

In most Middle East countries, the 15-to-24-year-old age group has grown to make up about a third of the population, but the percentage of early marriages is dropping. In Egypt, only 10% of 15-to-19-year-old females were married in 2003, down from 22% in 1976.

...In addition, Arab youths receive little in the way of birth control or sex education, say family planning experts in the Middle East, many of whom work discreetly to provide reproductive health services in conservative Muslim societies that hold women's maternal roles as sacrosanct.

"If access to contraceptives was widely and freely available, abortion wouldn't be necessary," said an official at a Western family planning organization in Yemen. She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear her organization would be targeted. Abortion, she said, is "a last resort."

According to most interpretations, Islam strictly forbids abortion after the fetus has reached 4 months, and allows it before then only in cases of violent rape or when birth poses an extreme threat to the physical or psychological health of the mother.

It's not just the Middle East, either. African women, in countries where the procedure is banned, have been maimed and killed by illegal abortions performed by amateurs.

A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.

Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.

Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.

For years, even despite the comeback of left-leaning political parties, illegal abortions have killed women in Latin America.

For proof that criminalizing abortion doesn't reduce abortion rates and only endangers the lives of women, consider Latin America. In most of the region, abortions are a crime, but the abortion rate is far higher than in Western Europe or the United States. Colombia - where abortion is illegal even if a woman's life is in danger - averages more than one abortion per woman over all of her fertile years. In Peru, the average is nearly two abortions per woman over the course of her reproductive years.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

Abortion is legal on demand in the region only in Cuba, and a few other countries permit it for extreme circumstances, mostly when the mother's life is at risk, the fetus will not live or the pregnancy is the result of rape. Even when pregnancies do qualify for legal abortions, women are often denied them because anti-abortion local medical officials and priests intervene, the requirements are unnecessarily stringent, or women do not want to incur the public shame of reporting rape.

But Latin Americans are beginning to look at abortion as an issue of maternal mortality, not just maternal morality. Where they have been conducted, polls show that Latin Americans support the right to abortion under some circumstances. Decriminalization, at least in part, is being seriously discussed in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Argentina, and perhaps will be on the agenda after the presidential election in July in Mexico.

One story, from a BBC article, sounds vaguely familiar.

Every year four million women in Latin America have an illegal abortion, according to the World Health Organisation.

Preventing illegal abortions, which leave hundreds of thousands of woman dead or seriously injured, has been the focus of the conference in Mexico. Many groups present believe the only way to reduce the numbers is to make the practice legal.

"It is the first to the third cause of maternal death in different countries in Latin America," the chair of the conference, Maria Consuelo Mejilla - director of Catholics For The Right To Decide, a Mexican pressure group - told BBC World Service's Outlook programme.

"It is affecting mostly poor women.

"Unsafe and illegal abortion in Latin America is a social justice problem. Women who have no resources die."

...Ms Mejilla of Catholics For The Right To Decide said that doctors' opposition to abortions could lead to some women being "maltreated" at hospitals.

She outlined the case of one 15-year-old Mexican girl who became pregnant after being raped and wished, together with her mother, to have an abortion.

However, the doctor they saw was against the practice, and delayed any help until eventually the girl had no option but to give birth.

"It is mostly affecting poor women... Women who have no resources die."

It may be considered cliché and "alarmist" to point to stories like those above as examples of what might could happen if access to safe, legal abortion is restricted — which seems to be the likely outcome of the Stupak amendment. The poor, who don't currently have access to the medical care they need, won't have access to abortion services, and the practice of not covering abortion services will very likely spread to private insurers and affect virtually all women who rely on private insurance.

If the examples of other countries bear out, effectively cutting off access to legal abortion — as the Stupak amendment would likely do — would immediately impact "women who have no resources", but eventually all women could be affected. Still, for an ideologue these are easy choices to make.

The newly unveiled Senate health care reform bill takes a more nuanced approach to abortion than the House bill does with the Stupak amendment.

The health care reform package unveiled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Wednesday night bars the use of federal funds for abortion services, but does not go as far as the House bill -- which prevents women in many cases from buying insurance with their own money that covers abortion.

The Senate version would require at least one plan within the health insurance exchange that the bill sets up to offer a plan that covers abortion and one that doesn't. It would also authorize the Health and Human Services Secretary to audit plans to make certain that abortion isn't being paid for with federal dollars.

Igor Vlosky further explains the Senate compromise.

The bill maintains the Senate Finance Committee’s immigration language and preserves much of the more moderate Capps-abortion compromise. Federal dollars can only be used to pay for abortions when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother or results from rape or incest; private premiums must be used to pay for any other type of abortion, including those for health reasons. Each plan in Exchange will decide whether to cover additional abortion services and at least one plan in each market must offer abortion services and one plan must not. In the public option, the Secretary can cover abortion only if the procedure is financed with private funds.

I am still wrapping my brain around how the Senate bill changes the debate over abortion in health care reform. Ruth Marcus and Lisa Miller make compelling arguments for a more nuanced debate on both sides. And while I'm still undecided on the seemingly Solomon-like compromise of the Senate bill, this latest debate over reproductive freedom and choice makes it clear that some choices are disturbingly easy for Democratic leaders to make.

§§§

The choice is front of Democratic leadership is spelled out pretty clearly by Tim Fernholz.

Peter Beinarthad a cheekily counterintuitive piece in The Daily Beast yesterday, arguing that the Stupak Amendment is good politics, since it represents the functional "big-tentism" of the Democratic party, which hearkens back to the days of FDR and LBJ, when a big-tent Democratic party built the modern welfare state we know and love.

In general, I agree with Peter: The Democratic party is better for being bigger, even it is trickier to assemble decent legislation because of that fact. Sometimes the sausage-making is going to get ugly and compromises will be hard for progressives to stomach. In this case, though, Peter is wrong. For him, the Stupak Amendment is just one of those ugly compromises, but his analysis is flawed -- and offers a warning today's progressives and Democrats would be wise to heed.

As Emily Douglas wrote, what's only slightly more disturbing than the Stupak amendment itself is the speed with which so many Democrats accepted its "necessity" and hinted that this is one of those times for pro-choice progressives to "take one for the team." It's a pattern that's cropped up again and again in progressive/Democratic politics — perhaps due to the Democratic party getting "bigger." During the Bush administration, when Republicans held the White House and the Congress it morphed into a strategy for getting Democrats back into power, and now it's apparently morphing into a strategy to keep Democrats in power.

Maybe it's that the party never got over losing the "Reagan Democrats" and have never stopped trying to get them back, but above strategy has the added effect of putting on the back burner constituencies whose numbers put them in the majority and/or whose specific issue-related concerns are not or are not perceived to be "majority issues" — the kinds of issues that are "safe" for politicians to risk taking a stand on, because they sufficiently popular or a matter of concern a vast majority of voters.

It doesn't mean that political leaders are "flip-flopping" on those particular issues. It just means that the message to those constituencies is, "You're right. But not right now."

No one in the blogosphere, I think, has summed it up better than Kos did a few years ago.

One of the key problems with the Democratic Party is that single issue groups have hijacked it for their pet causes. So suddenly, Democrats are the party of abortion, of gun control, of spottend owls, of labor, of trial lawyers, etc, etc., et-frickin'-cetera. We don't stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes. We don't have a core philosophy, we have a list with boxes to check off.

So while Republicans focus on building an ideological foundation for their cause, we focus on checking off those boxes on the list. Check enough boxes, and you're a Democrat in good standing.

And again here.

And while there are Democrats in the Colorado House that are less than optimal on any number of progressive issues, the entire movement benefits from having a friendly party in control.

It's an attitude that, as a gay activist, I've heard too many times — and one I railed against upon my return from YearlyKos a year later.

I’ve written before about my dismay with Democrats when it come to gay issues, and my frustration with Howard Dean and the direction the party seems to be taking where LGBT issues are concerned. And I suppose going into YearlyKos I should have known what I was getting into. Kos is, after all, known for saying that us “single issue” folks should zip it, sit tight on the back burner and support the party no matter what, even when it backs candidates that don’t support our concerns or issues. I should have known what to expect based on the comments I’d seen when the subject came up on netroots sites like MyDD and DailyKos. I should have figured I’d hear the same things I’d heard all along, even during the FMA debate.

I guess just hoped being there and bringing it all up might help, or might mean something. But I heard the same thing, even from gay folks who are just as frustrated as I am, and from supportive straight people too: this is what we have to do to win, and if gay issues have to take an extended back seat consider it taking one for the team.

The thing is, there comes a point when those of us consistently asked or expected to "take one for the team" start to wonder whose team it really is.

You know what I don't want to hear right now about the Stupak-Pitts amendment banning abortion coverage from federally subsidized health insurance policies? That it's the price of reform, and prochoice women should shut up and take one for the team. "If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon "cultural" issues like gender and racial equality. Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your sixty-four Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other antichoice "progressive" Christians, men: why don't you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?

...Women Democrats have taken an awful lot of hits for the team lately. Many of us didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary because the goal of electing a woman seemed less important than the goal of electing the best possible president. Only a self-hater or a featherhead didn't feel some pain about that. And although women are hardly alone in this, we've seen some pretty big hopes set aside in the first year of the Obama administration. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would expand women's protections against sexism in the workplace, is on the back burner. Meanwhile, the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is not only alive and well; it's newly staffed with antichoicers like Alexia Kelley of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, who, as Frances Kissling notes in Salon, has compared abortion to torture.

I know what you're thinking: conservative Democrats like Stupak took Republican districts to win us both houses of Congress. Thanks a lot, Howard Dean, whose bright idea it was to recruit them, but those majorities would not be there, and Obama would not be in the White House, if not for prochoice women and men--their votes, talent, money, organizational capacity and shoe leather. We knocked ourselves out, and it wasn't so that religious reactionaries like Stupak--who, as Jeff Sharlet writes in Salon, is a member of the Family, the secretive right-wing Christian-supremacist Congressional coven--would control both parties. Elections have consequences, you say? Exactly: Obama, the prochoice, prowoman candidate, won. Stupak didn't put him in the White House, and neither did the Catholic bishops or the white antifeminist welfare staters of Beinart's imagination. We did. And we deserve better from Obama than sound bites like "this is a healthcare bill, not an abortion bill." Abortion is healthcare. That's the whole point.

And — something I've been writing about for a few years now, and that Katha Pollitt expressed in the post I just quoted — we begin to wonder why we're "knocking ourselves out" for it.

This is the crux of the problem I have with this strategy for Democrats, and calls to put "party unity" above single issues, with promises that the party will get back to those issues after it’s safely back in power. But if they regain power, with narrow margins and while winning the support of moderate-to-conservative voters by stepping back on issues like gay equality and reproductive choice, will those same moderate-to-conservative voters let Democrats return to progressive positions on those issues and remain in power?

Probably not, at least not without the help of the very people from whom the Democratic party is distancing itself; help by working on those issues in our own back yard, moving the ball down the field against some pretty tough opposition while the party watches and waits from somewhere near the end zone. We have to get the ball down the field on our own. In states like Maine, it might happen. In states as conservative as Texas it ain’t gonna happen. And on a national level chances are slim we’re going to get much support. We’re basically abandoned on the field, at least until we’ve moved our issues far enough that it’s safe for the Democratic party to take them up again. Even if we’re able to do that, we’re probably going to take several hits and get rather bloodied in the process.

It won’t surprise me if Democratic candidates attempt the same strategy in other states, and with some degree of success. It will surprise me even less if the same strategy is evident in the Dems’ 2008 presidential and congressional campaigns. Successfully, even. That will essentially leave gay and lesbian Americans out in the cold politically, without a (major, viable) party that has a clear position of standing up for our equality.

We wonder if we have the same goals as our "teammates" at all, and if we're working against our own interests to some degree while watching them hand the ball to the other(?) team.

A Democrat who wins under those conditions will be hard pressed to govern from a progressive position, and keep the voters who gave him the margin of victory — are decidedly not progressive on some issues. (The best progressive evangelicals can do on gay issues and reproductive choice is to just not talk about them or ignore them. Candidates who want their votes would do well do downplay those issues as well. Note, again, the progressive laundry list petition linked above.)

Progressives, being the base, don’t provide that margin of victory, because they don’t “swing.” And in the current political landscape, they don’t have anywhere else to go. The Greens? Sure, go ahead. Progressives will volunteer, phonebank, fundraise, and canvas for their candidates; everything that any campaign needs hordes of volunteers to do. But we will do it for candidates who aren’t always progressive, and yet believing that we’ll get a progressive-governing elected official after the election. But we do not have to be pandered to, courted, catered to, or convinced, because — again — where else are we going to go?

We can’t afford to stay at home either, which differentiates us from the Republicans’ religious right base. They have less to lose if their candidate doesn’t win because the reality is that if our candidate wins he will probably have to spend so much of his time and energy cleaning up the mess of the last 7 1/2 years that he won’t be able to do much in terms of moving in a more progressive direction. There’s a swamp to be drained, and then alligators to fight as the first order of business. Once that’s done, we might well be half-way through the second term. At which point, the best we can hope for is a couple of Supreme Court appointments, and some executive orders.

Progressive, in a sense, have become political prisoners of a sort. After we work to get a candidate elected, the real work of then moving that candidate towards more progressive positions begins. We will get them elected so that we may begin lobbying and petitioning them and hoping they will listen.

We begin to wonder who our friends are, and if they really are our friends.

I find myself returning the playground analogy; probably something unavoidable in this situation, for a gay man who came out and grew up smack in the middle of the bible belt. Hearing the Republican strategy is reminiscent of hearing the school bully say he’s gonna pound you good after the bell rings.

And sure enough, he’s waiting for you after school. You know he’s big. Too big to take on by yourself. But you have friends, right? They know how big the bully is. Big enough to pretty much control the whole school. But they’re your friends, right? They might get banged up, but surely they’re not going to stand by and watch you take a beating right?

Well.

...To return to the schoolyard for a minute, maybe if you give your "friends" your lunch money, they’ll keep the bully off your back.

Or not.

Sometimes you get to thinking your friends may find it inconvenient to be your friends. Maybe they have an overblown perception of the bully’s popularity, despite evidence to the contrary. And even if he isn’t very popular any more, the bully has a posse that gave him his power, and they’d like to win over that posse for themselves. So, if that posse doesn’t like you much, your friends might have to put some distance between you and them. Like the DCCC suddenly forgetting its non-discrimination policy includes/d sexual orientation.

So, your friends won’t sit next to you in the lunchroom anymore. But if they make new friends at the cool kids table, they’ll say nice things about you. Maybe that’ll get the bully and his posse to ease up on you, right?

Well.

...And if your friends seem likely to stand by and watch you take a beating, and tell you later (when nobody else is watching or listening) what a shame they thought it was ... well, then you don’t have any friends.

§§§

Whether the Stupak amendment ends up in the final health care reform bill or is replaced by the more moderate compromises in the Senate bill, Tim Fernholz is right that both the passage of the amendment and the almost immediate response that women and pro-choice progressives should "take one for the team" hold a lesson and a warning for both progressives and Democrats.

Actually, the warning and the lesson are the same for both progressives and Democrats (note that the two are by no means synonymous).

For progressives, wondering how the Democratic victories of 2006 and 2008 got us here, it means understanding that merely getting Democrats elected is not sufficient.

But over and over I basically hear about all of the above “If that’s what we have to do to win … ”
And then I remembered something I hear a certain A-list blogger (who honestly seems to care about these issues, and keeps asking how Dems should talk about them) say a while back: just getting Democrats elected is not sufficient. Certainly not if they’re going to put their constituents and the convictions in the closet in order to win. A party that believes it has to put its own values on the back burner in order to win must not believe that it can and should win based on its values. It becomes something else entirely, and will find it hard to go back if the trick should work.

At some point, candidates who get our support, our votes, our money, our time, energy, trust and confidence have to face some real consequences when they don't follow through with progressive stands on the issue and progressive changes in policy.

And I don't mean consequences in terms of blog posts and editorials. For example, progressives could take a lesson from the gay community's response to the Obama administration's ill-considered brief on the Defense of Marriage Act.

By now, the Obama Justice Department's "Defense of Marriage" brief, which was filed more than a week ago, has essentially become known as the brief heard around the LGBT world, in large part due to its insulting comparisons of homosexuality to incest, and it's general support for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which the brief called a "rational" policy.
In response to the DOMA brief, as well as the Obama administration's silence on LGBT rights (the outlier is last week's extension of some limited partner benefits to LGBT employees), many LGBT donors to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) have been making their anger known by bailing on DNC fundraisers. A fundraiser in D.C. scheduled for Thursday night with VP Joe Biden has already seen its fare share of prominent LGBT folks backing out, and now comes word that a fundraiser to be held at Fenway Park in Boston is going to be protested by local LGBT organizers with Join the Impact Massachusetts, who are upset about the DOMA brief. Here's the scoop:

As we've all seen, we've gotten more in the past 6 days for the LGBT community than we have in the past 6 months. Once this firestorm of criticism and public pressure began over the repugnant DOMA brief, we began hearing that the Hate Crimes bill may pass very soon. Then once the boycotting began of the DNC fundraiser in Washington, DC, we then learned about the relocation benefits memorandum which seemed to be a direction reaction to the boycott.
Money talks folks and we have a HUGE opportunity here. Putting on this protest will be emblematic of a larger issue at hand for the Obama administration and the Dems. No longer is the protest singled out just in Washington, DC, but now they're spreading. If the Obama administration and the Dems want to tamper down frustrations, the only way for them to do so will be to take concrete strong action to pass substantive LGBT civil rights measures. Let's make them do it!

That was June. Fast forward to the Obama administration arguing in August that DOMA should be repealed, pledging (again) to end Don't Ask Don't Tell, and signing the Hate Crimes Bill. Of these it remains to be seen how much tangible change the first two actually mean, but the LGBT community has shown at least some willingness to hold the administration accountable. Consequences work, and merely being a Democrat can't be enough for a candidate to earn our trust, confidence, time, energy, and campaign contributions.

These things must no longer be taken for granted, or given unconditionally, but reserved for candidates who stand up for progressive values and have a record of following through. A Democrat who asks for and accepts our contributions and support should be be held accountable, and face the consequence of losing both if he or she doesn't follow through.

For progressives, the lesson is: stop making it easy for Democrats not to stand up for progressive values and ideals in policymaking.

For Democrats, the lesson is: stop making it increasingly easy for progressives not to support you.

There are many constituencies that Democrats may too easily take for granted, among them pro-choice progressives, and the LGBT community. Perhaps that's because we're perceived as having nowhere else to go. But we constitute an energetic part of the Democratic base. Or at least we do when we turn out. But as Tim Kaine pointed out, a Democrat who moves away from progressive values telegraphs that he or she doesn't need our support.

"After the [June] primary was done, his advisers basically said, distance yourself from the president. We think we have our base locked down, we've got to win independents. And we're going to win by being negative about McDonnell," Kaine said. "That was the basic strategy they pursued, despite some significant urging to the contrary."
Asked about his own advice to Deeds, who lost to McDonnell on Nov. 3 by 17 percentage points, Kaine said: "I'd rather not talk about my personal conversations. But what I will say is that I always believed from the very beginning that the paradigm in Virginia had changed and that the way to win the race was to energize voters who had demonstrated they would vote for Democrats. That I did advise him very, very early. I advised all the candidates, prior to the primary, that was a path to victory."
..."I think the issue of being nervous about the Virginia electorate was overdone and I think Creigh did exactly what the McDonnell campaign hoped he would do, which was distance himself from the president and national issues," Kaine said.

The truth is, there's no such thing as a constituency that has "nowhere else to go." It's fine to be a "big tent" party, but if the constituencies that constitute your base are so taken for granted that they are pushed closer and closer to the back of the tent, that just leave them closer to the exits. As Tim Ferholz (again) points out.

Ultimately, he fails to understand that every majority contains the seeds of its own undoing. While Peter focuses on the economic aspects of the previous big-tent Democratic majority, he downplays the advances made on civil rights and gender equality, especially by LBJ. As Peter recognizes, the Civil Rights Act and other culturally progressive victories led to the Democratic majority's defeat as racists and social conservatives fled to the Republican party. He suggests that this was a result of a decision for the party to become more "pure" under pressure from activists, but that's foolish. It was because the party decided to do the right thing under pressure from activists. Does Peter think this was a bad decision? He doesn't say.

Believers in the Big Tent, like Peter and myself, have to be very careful about the compromises they make. If you lose track of what the point of politics is -- what you leave behind -- then you risk betraying the entire progressive agenda. If Peter thinks today's progressives should choose economic issues over other ones, he should make that case explicitly. But he shouldn't pretend that it's a normatively good choice. There's going to come a time when this Democratic majority has the chance to do something so big and important that it will destroy itself by alienating its conservative and moderate members. Maybe it will be gay marriage, maybe it will be the Freedom of Choice Act, who knows. I hope the leadership at the time has the principles and the guts to pass the law and blow up their majority. That's what it's there for, after all.

The warning for progressives is to choose what kind of party we want. The warning for Democrats is to choose what kind of party they want to be. The good of the country may depend upon close we come to making the same choices.

Markos and Jerome opened their book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, with this quote from Gandhi.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

I’d like to suggest another Gandhi quote to the netroots and the party leadership.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

If, that is, it’s a change you really want to see.

If that's not an easy choice, it should be.

Conservative's Race to Oblivion, Pt. 2 of 3

Terrance Heath — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:52:39 -0800

Michelle Bachman's "Superbowl of Freedom" (or "Bachmannalia") was not the first protest with such attention grabbing signage, but merely the latest. September saw Glenn Beck's 9/12 marchers descend upon Washington. Again, they brought their message-bearing signs and posters.

And their signs made their message and motivation clear.

On Saturday (9/12), thousands of protesters gathered in Washington to express their disdain for President Obama and his policies - particularly health care reform. The crowd was populated by white political conservatives - - organized by a loose-knit coalition of anti-tax, small-government proponents, and widely promoted by sympathetic voices in the blogosphere and on TV and talk radio. The protest was scheduled for 9/12 - the day after the anniversary of the terrorist attacks - as way to mark a point in time when Democrats and Republicans supposedly "shared a sense of purpose and unity and all Americans were patriotic."

What few, if any, of the mainstream reports included in their coverage of the event was any discussion of the racial composition of the 912 crowd which was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. According to The Washington Independent (the only news source I could find that was talking about this issue), the crowd was "99 percent white." The reporter noted, "in my four-plus hours at the event, I'd only seen three African-American demonstrators." When the reporter asked Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the organizers of the event, about the lack of racial diversity in the crowd, DeMint blamed the event's timing and the media coverage.

"If anyone does a fair analysis of the crowd, it's a cross-section of the population. It's probably just the time and organization and the media that promoted it," DeMint said.

Now, just because it's an exclusively white-folks event doesn't necessarily mean that it's fueled by racism, but it does give one pause. I certainly think it's possible to oppose the policies of the Obama administration and not have those views fueled by racism. Yet, you can tell a good deal about a protest from the images and iconography that protesters choose to convey their message. And the signs people created and carried provide another kind of other evidence that the rhetorical and visual strategies of the protesters drew on a deeply embedded white racial frame.

More than that, the most controversial sign was clearly not the product of an activist's spontaneous enthusiasm. It was ordered, printed, and distributed.

The sign said it all. It was not some last-minute message some meth addict scrawled in crayon on a scrap of cardboard. No, this sign was professionally printed. White block letters on a blue background, the four-word message was in all caps. Someone had to have thought this through. Someone wrote it, edited it, planned it, designed it, ordered it, paid for it. Someone approved it, printed it, distributed it. And then someone thought this was a message he or she wanted to convey to the world. Thank goodness someone had the courage to take a photo of it, and then Huffington Post had the guts to post it on its home page.

The sign made me nauseous, made me embarrassed, made me wonder if at long last there is no decency on the far right. The sign said:

"BURY OBAMACARE WITH KENNEDY"

..What would they have done if liberals had printed signs that equated Ronald Reagan's burial with the hoped-for death of George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security? Or Bill Buckley's painful passing with the GOP's loss of the White House in 2008? Or the demise of my right-wing former colleague Bob Novak with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts? You can't imagine that, can you? Because, while we progressives have our moments of frustration and our occasional lack of couth, there is nothing I can think of that compares to the sick, savage sign that the teabaggers were waving in Washington.

As someone who's worked as a publications coordinator before, I can tell you that a having a sign like that at a protest of that size doesn't happen overnight. It has to be planned for, budgeted, and requires someone to coordinate the process. It requires a concept that then goes to a designer who executes it. The designer produces proofs with various different versions the concept — with different colors, configurations, fonts, etc. — which are reviewed, discussed and reveiwed again, until a final selection is made. Then the designer produces a final proof. Probably a color proof, very close to how the finished product will look.

Then the designer sends all the files and artwork to a printer, who has been contacted earlier in the process in order to make sure the printer can take the job, plans for it, and puts it on their production calendar. That means by this point the printer already knows how what kind of paper is needed and how many copies will be printed. The printer will then produce a blueline, giving the customer one last chance to look at the printing job before the point-of-no-return: when the ink hits the paper. (Making changes at this point, however, will cost you considerably.) With final approval, it's printed and delivered either to a mailhouse or to directly to the customer for distribution.

Given the quality of the signs, and assuming that at least several thousand were printed, I'd estimate that it took four to six weeks from concept and design to printing and delivery. And every step of this process requires sign off on the text, design, cost, etc. It means that someone — actually, several someones — at the American Life League, which distributed the posters, signed off on the design and the message over and over again. In other words, the far-right messaging graduated from the grassroots to the organizational level, and now it apparently has the tacit approal of congressional conservative leadership.

But in truth, conservative leaders have never strongly disapproved, no matter how extreme the messaging gets.

It doesn’t take a psychic to predict this. It just takes a look at the escalating rhetoric. To anyone familiar with the tactics of terror, is clear where this is going. First there is the threat of violence. It may be spoken, or it may not. It may be as simple as a hanging noose. The intended effect is the same: to put the target on notice to shut up, stay in his or place, and don’t dare challenge the status quo.

It is delivered, often, with a smile that implies not merely a willingness to do harm, but perhaps even a desire to do so — “I will hurt you, and I will enjoy doing it.”

I glimpsed that familiar smile this week, in a photograph of a congressman in my own state being cheerfully hung in effigy, because of his support for health care reform.

If this is the face of anti-health care reform protest, the GOP has a serious problem.

This unidentified man decided he was doing the Tea Party-anti-reform effort a real solid by hanging freshman Maryland Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil in effigy [note the creepily expert knotted noose] with a placard “Congress Traitors The American [and a word that looks like "idol"].

The event — a rally in Salisbury, Md. on the Eastern Shore — was attended by members of the business-funded Americans for Prosperity, a group that includes James Miller, a Federal Trade Commission chairman and budget director during the Reagan administration.

UPDATE: The rally wasn’t officially sanctioned by AFP — but the group’s members attended the protest, which coincided with an AFP health care meeting, says a spokeswoman for the group.

Officially sanctioned or not, this is the face of health reform opposition. But the GOP doesn't think it has a problem. In fact, GOP appears to be vaguely amused. At least, they're amused enough to chuckle over lynching (basically, a variation on the familiar smile mentioned above).

Rep. Todd Akin, a conservative Republican from Missouri, held a town-hall event this week in his district, and reflected on right-wing mobs who are fighting against health care reform.

“This particular meeting, in a way is a little bit unique,” Akin said. “Different people from Washington, D.C., have come back to their districts and have town hall meetings, and they almost got lynched.”

The conservative crowd thought this was great. “I would assume you’re not approving lynchings, because we don’t want to do that,” Akin said, generating more laughs as he put his hand to his neck.

Look, I realize Akin wasn’t encouraging “lynchings” and he was probably trying to be funny. But Akin and other conservative leaders have whipped up the right-wing base with a combination of lies and rage, and the results have bordered on dangerous. One Democratic lawmaker has received death threats because he supports health care reform. Another Democratic lawmaker was “physically assaulted.” Far-right activists have registered their misguided, uninformed fury with everything from nooses to tombstones to signs with Nazi “SS” lettering.

The history of lynching in America is well documented.

Well known enough for Akin to know both that a referencing it would get a rise out of his audience, and that he had to admonish his audience for its response, at the very least, before extending the joke himself. The crowds at townhalls across the country resemble nothing so much as lynch mobs, and the trend is moving towards that model rather than away from it.

The model is one of fear and intimidation employed to keep people from upsetting the status quo. In the South, decades ago, it was an effective terrorist tactic employed against African Americans even suspected of transgressing a status quo in which their “place” was strictly defined, by asserting their personhood and demanding recognition of their civil rights.

It was the tactic, fueled by anger and entitlement, employed when the escalation of fear failed to stop the momentum of movement toward justice. What those who employed it could not stop through persuasion or the democratic process, they sought to stop through violence and terror. What they could not defeat with reasoned argument, they sought to silence. The violence of those mobs was acknowledged with a wink, a nod and a chuckle by those in power, and sometimes excused outright — as in the first trial of the men accused of murdering civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. The presiding judge, who sentenced some of the men involved, was heard to say “They killed a nigger, one Jew, and one white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved.” (Ronald Reagan would later launch his presidential campaign in the same town where the three young men were killed.)

It was effective, serving its purpose well. So it was tolerated, accepted, even encouraged by those in authority, rather than condemned. It remains to be seen if the thundering storm of fear, anger and violence will be enough to hold back progress. But no one from among Republican leadership has stepped forward to clearly and forcefully condemn the increasing venom now veering into threats and violence.

In Tampa, a townhall meeting degenerated into “cat calls, jeering and shoving,” amid shouted slogans (of no more than three or four words) that have taken the place of honest debate.
A protest outside a St. Louis townhall meeting resulted in arrests. One congressman, Brad Miller (D, NC), has received death threats.
At least one freshman Democrat has been physically assaulted. Another, Tim Bishop (D,NY), needed a police escort to his car.

Rep. Brian Baird (D,WA) received a fax that could be read as a threat against the president.

The Secret Service may investigate a fax sent to a Democratic lawmaker that depicts President Barack Obama as the Joker and warns of “death to all Marxists.”

The black-and-white fax portrays Obama in makeup similar to that worn by actor Heath Ledger in his portrayal of the Joker in last summer’s “The Dark Knight.”

On Obama’s forehead is a communist hammer-and-sickle insignia, and beneath the image is the text: “Death to All Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) received the fax and passed it along to U.S. Capitol Police.

The Secret Service investigates threats made against the president. Ed Donovan, of Secret Service Public Affairs, said that the fax was “potentially an investigative intelligence matter.”

Rep. David Scott (D,GA) had his district office vandalized with a spray-painted swastika.

The debate over health care took an ugly turn Tuesday morning after a swastika was found painted outside of Congressman David Scott’s Smyrna office.

The incident follows national coverage of Scott’s encounter with a citizen opposed to heath care reform at a recent town hall in Douglasville. That forum’s topic was not health care, but reconstruction of Ga. 92.

Since then the 13th district representative’s two local offices have been flooded with angry phone calls, faxes and e-mails.

“We’ve received a lot of ugly and threatening phone calls,” said Scott aide Isaac Dodoo.

Scott also received a version of the fax sent to Rep. Baird.

One health reform opponent has encouraged physical violence and the use of firearms. (Note the full embrace of the "mob" meme.)

Based on the news that health care events are edging into violence, an anti-health care reform protester in New Mexico named Scott Oskay is calling on his hundreds of online followers to bring firearms to town halls, and to 'badly hurt' SEIU and ACORN counter protesters.

Popularized in part by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, the hashtag symbol he's using, #iamthemob, has gone viral on twitter, appearing several times a minute according to a recent search.

And health reform opponents have brought guns to townhalls.

One, near the president's townhall meeting, brought a gun with him.

There is a man with a gun near an Obama rally. Here is the video. This is insane!

Did you see his sign? "It Is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty." That is from this Jefferson quote:

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

This is the same exact quote Tim McVeigh was referencing in a shirt he wore... before bombing the Oklahoma City federal building.

This is the same GOP that turned the Sotomayor confirmation hearings into an opportunity to appeal to the basest of their base, without seeming to care how it would play to the rest of the country — to such a degree that they no longer, if they ever did, reserve their racist comments for the president insead of attacking his daughters, and they elect a young republican leader who only seems to confirm the worst suspicions about the GOP regarding race.

The sentiments expressed by the GOP supporters in those videos aren’t still simmering below the surface. They’re bubbling right on top of surface. Occasionally the boil over, most recently on the conservative online community Free Republic, where — in an incident that suggests why the Obamas take care to shelter their daughters from politics and the media — pictures of Malia Obama wearing a peace symbol t-shirt received comments laden with racial slurs from the site’s users.

"A typical street whore." "A bunch of ghetto thugs." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion."

These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative ‘Free Republic’ blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.

The thread was accompanied by a photo of Michelle Obama speaking to Malia that featured the caption, "To entertain her daughter, Michelle Obama loves to make monkey sounds."

Though this may sound like the sort of thing one might read on an Aryan Nation or white power website, they actually appeared on what is commonly considered one of the prime online locations for U.S. Conservative grassroots political discussion and organizing – and for a short time, the comments seemed to have the okay of site administrators.

One shudders to think what the Freepers’ reaction might have been if young Miss Obama had been photographed in any of the unfortunate circumstances that the Bush twins found themselves in — or, at least one of them — when the camera happened to turn on them. If she’d been falling down drunk, or caught trying to buy a drink while underage, conservatives would almost certainly have howled for DCS to raid the White House, for the Obama’s to be investigated for child neglect, and even for Obama to follow Sarah Palin’s selfless example and resign for the sake of his family.

And they would have howled as nearly as loudly that the children of politicians ought to be "off limits" as they did went the Bush twins were charged with underage drinking (Jenna’s second charge), and when Bristol Palin became the newest face of unwed teenage motherhood. But at least they didn’t do it while wearing t-shirts with peace symbols on them. Unfortunately, it’s too early for Miss Obama to be rehabbed by writing a children’s book and getting married, since she’s, like, eleven.

The thread was left up by site administrators until a writer doing research on the conservative movement lodged a complaint, removed, then re-posted, placed under review following criticism from other blogs, reposted with the original complaint included and the writer’s email address revealed, and finally removed again.

However, it is not lost. It can be seen via this screen capture.

But it’s not just the base. As the timeline below suggests, it’s also the leadership, both in the party and in the conservative movement itself.

(Note: I know this timeline is by no means comprehensive. Incidents were left out in the interest of publishing this post sooner. But I will continue to update it, and re-post it one of the other posts in this series.)

The most recent example took place just as Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings began, when Audra Shay handily won the election to chair the Young Republicans, after a Facebook flap involving "Mad Coons."

Note to Republicans: Racist “humor,” the Internet, and political ambitions don’t mix. Audra Shay, vice chairman of the Young Republicans and the leading candidate to be elected its chairman on Saturday, is now the latest in a growing list of GOP officials learning this lesson the hard way, based on pictures of a now-deleted Facebook page obtained by The Daily Beast.

On Wednesday, Shay—a 38-year-old Army veteran, mother, and event planner from Louisiana who has been endorsed by her governor, Bobby Jindal—was holding court on her Facebook page, initiating a political conversation by posting that “WalMart just signed a death warrant” by “endorsing Obama’s healthcare plan.” At 1:52, a friend named listed as Eric S. Piker, but whose personal page says his actual name is Eric Pike, wrote “It’s the government making us commies… can’t even smoke in my damn car… whats next they going to issue toilet paper once a month… tell us how to wipe our asses…”

Two minutes later, Piker posted again saying “Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals.”

Eight minutes after that, at 2:02, Shay weighed in on Piker’s comments: “You tell em Eric! lol.”

A screenshot of the Facebook page (before scrubbing) is available here.

Shay admonished commenters (once the comments went public), but it appeared to do little good.

For her part, Shay responded to the flap — weakly, though — saying that she’d been responding to Piker’s earlier comments. But as John Avlon noted, that Shays response came just 8 minutes after Piker’s "mad coons" comment "strains the credibility of this defense. After all, why would Shay response to Piker’s earlier comment on a completely different thread? And why, if that’s the case, wouldn’t she quote the earlier response, so people would know what she was responding to?

Perhaps she doesn’t know how to use Facebook. That at least would fit in with the apparent ineptitude of conservatives who air their racism via email and social networks — they just made a stupid mistake, and sent the email to the "wrong" list (though that doesn’t answer which list is the right one to send a picture of president Obama as a "spook" or a White House lawn transformed into a watermelon patch), or commented on the "wrong" thread.

Not only did Shay’s Facebook friends ratchet up the racism, but Shay unfriended some who dared to criticize her. And then there was the way she won the election.

Perhaps less remarkable than the outcome–new Young Republicans Chairman Audra Shay bragged on her Facebook page that she had pledges from the majority of delegate going in–was how the vote played out. Yesterday’s election was closed to members of the press, but The Daily Beast has pulled together an account of the vote, and the runup to it, and the details are shocking. Some highlights:

Shay’s opponent, Rachel Hoff, was the subject of an ugly sexual innuendo whisper campaign that questioned her reasons for supporting civil unions.

Shay’s electoral slate, dubbed Team Renewal, battled desperately — some likened it to intimidation — and ultimately, successfully to block a motion that would have allowed delegates to cast their votes by secret ballot, for fear they’d lose.

Near-fistfights on the floor, and finally something of a boycott, as some of Hoff’s slate of candidates lower on the ticket chose to remove their names from the ballot after her defeat.

“They just took a vote that may have set the party back 30 years,” said the co-founder of HipHopRepublican.com, Lenny McAllister, speaking from the floor of the Hyatt convention hall. “They just voted for a candidate who has a demonstrated tolerance for racial intolerance. She has joked about lynching and then claimed to be a victim. As a black man, I still don’t see what’s funny about that.”

Lenny McAllister’s words may be more prescient than Shays and her supporters — or many Republicans — know or care to know.

This is the same GOP that anointed as its main media spokesperson a man whose own words regarding race are cause for concern.

This is already being done by plenty of other people, but I can’t help myself. When a guy who just a month ago said “We need segregated buses,” takes umbrage at the notion that people think he’s a racist… Well, it’s just too hard to resist.

They are the ones with prejudice and bigotry coursing through their vanes [sic], through their hearts, and through their souls. They are consumed with jealousy and rage. They are all liberals–and make no mistake: That’s what this is about. It is about ideology. It isn’t about race. It’s about their being jealous and attempting to discredit me, and they’ve now sunk to the low of repeating fabricated quotes that they cannot source…. These people are scum.

Yeah. Sure, Rush.

He was going to own a football team, but not anymore. Apparently, a number of black players can’t see themselves on a team that’s owned by this guy.

Ladies and Gentlemen. This is Rush Limbaugh.

(For your listening pleasure, enjoy “Barack the Magic Negro” while you’re reading the quotes below.)

LIMBAUGH: It’s not reasonable that you should understand the insanity that local and state and federal bureaucracies are doing. It’s perfectly normal and understandable that none of what they do would make sense to you. My question — OK, a 1 cent sales tax to fight gang violence. What do you spend the money on to fight gang violence? Afterschool program — don’t we already have afterschool programs? Don’t we already have — what do you call it, extracurricular events? Midnight basketball — I mean, we’ve done it all. We’ve taken the favorite sport of gangs, and we put it at midnight to get them on the basketball court. We had 100,000 new cops with Clinton — we’ve done it all. And the problem still is out of control. Liberalism doesn’t work.

I’m gonna tell you what. If they’re gonna raise the sales tax in this little — Salinas, California, wherever you’re talking about — if they’re gonna raise 1 cent sales tax to handle gang violence, then the money oughta go to the purchase of bulletproof vests for the law-abiding citizens when they leave their home.

Potential NFL owner Limbaugh declares basketball “the favorite sport of gangs,” Media Matters, October 7, 2009.

Source

♠♠♠

“I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses – it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.”

“…White Americans are racists who have created what they call free markets that really just enslave the rest of America and her trading partners,” Limbaugh also mocked. “I mean, it was white Americans that ran off Van Jones. No, look, let’s just follow Eric Holder’s advice and not be cowards about all this. Let’s have an open conversation, an honest conversation about all of our typical white grandmothers. You had one, I had one. Obama had one. They’re racists just like our students are. ACORN – hey, nothing but racism fueling the pursuit of ACORN.”

“…If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable, why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable?” the talk show host asked. “I’m sorry – I mean, this is the way my mind works. But apparently now we don’t choose racism, we just are racists. We are born that way. We don’t choose it. So shouldn’t it be acceptable, excuse – this is according to the way the left thinks about things.”

Limbaugh: We need segregated buses, RawStory, September 17, 2009.

Source.

♠♠♠

LIMBAUGH:
We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

Limbaugh Claims He’s Being Told ‘To Bend Over, Grab The Ankles’ Because Obama’s ‘Father Was Black’, ThinkProgress, January 22, 2009.
Source.
♠♠♠

Secretary Powell says his endorsement is not about race,” Limbaugh wrote. “OK, fine. I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Racism and Rush: Limbaugh’s Response to Colin Powell, Geoffrey Dunn, The Huffington Post, October 20, 2008.

Source.

♠♠♠

“NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons”

From the January 19, 2007, edition (subscription required) of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show

Source.

♠♠♠

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is — you’re not going to believe this, but it’s very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they can’t wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

CALLER: Uh, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: It’s black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they’re in trouble.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. The black population.

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

On the August 21, 2007 broadcast of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show.

Source.

♠♠♠

“Sorry to say this, I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go,” Limbaugh said. “I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.”

Limbaugh’s comments touch off controversy, ESPN.COM, October 1, 2003.

Source.

These are just the ones I could track down this afternoon. I’ll add more if I find them. And it’s worth noting that I’ve only grabbed the quotes I found at reliable sources. Honestly, even if the one quote that’s being attributed to him can’t be verified because comes from a book that doesn’t offer a source for the quote, the stuff that can be verified as coming out of his mouth are bad enough.

This is the same Republican Party that gave us an endless parade of racist imagery during the campaign. This is the same Republican party that didn't get then and doesn't get now that in many ways the election wasn't just about choosing a president, but choosing what kind of country we want to be. And what we don't want to be

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It was this. I don’t know when it happened, and it’s probably impossible to tell. But at some point during the campaign, the election shifted towards being about more than just choosing a president. Maybe it was the candidacies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — made possible by the progressive movements that have worked to extend America’s promise to more Americans, often against the will of a great many of their fellow citizens. Maybe it was Obama’s speech, openly addressing the race issue that had bubbled (barely) below the surface of the campaign up to them. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of never ending wars, a collapsed economy, and rising inequality. Maybe it was the fact that where the 2006 had its “Macacca Moment,” this election had a million of them.

Whenever it happened, and whatever the catalyst was. At some point, we weren’t just choosing a president anymore. We were choosing what kind of country we want to be.

The New York Post’s cartoon, in that context, is just a reminder that we’re not there yet, not all of us want to get there, and some of us will keep pulling in the opposite direction.

This is the Republican party that doesn't get that we're still choosing what kind of country we want to be, and that we're moving — albeit more slowly than I and other progressives would like — away from their old, outdated model. As Republican David Frum said in Newsweek in March, "the GOP is trying to govern a country that doesn't exist anymore." The longer they chose that path, and rely on an increasingly extreme fringe, the further Americans will move away from them.

Thus far it looks like this is the path they've chosen, and continue to chose. And they appear — to borrow a term conservatives used so often during the George W. Bush administration — to be disturbingly "resolute" in "staying the course."

Conservatives' Race to Oblivion, Pt. 1

Terrance Heath — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:31:17 -0800

I've used this quote (attributed to Maya Angelou) before: "When people show you who they really are, believe them." I guess in periods of tremendous change people really reveal who they really are. I'll return to this in more detail post, but the news and debate leading up to and following the passage of health care reform in the House is at least worth a quick roundup, if only because it all comes together in a clear context.

First, let me reiterate that I'll be the first to say that the anger directed at the president, Congress, and the policy changes they're trying to make are not entirely rooted in racism, but have deep roots in the economic consequences of the last few decades for the people in some of the reddest states. That said, it's becoming impossible to ignore that a significant amount is also rooted in the racism and ethnocentrism conservatives have used to divert their constituents' attention — and rage — towards more convevient targets.

By now, everyone knows that only one Republican voted for the House health reform bill, Joe Cao (R-LA).

Mr. Cao (pronounced gow; rhymes with cow), a freshman from New Orleans, was elected last year in an upset victory over Representative William J. Jefferson, a Democrat who was under indictment on federal corruption charges at the time and has since been convicted.

"Tonight, I voted to keep taxpayer dollars from funding abortion and to deliver access to affordable health care to the people of Louisiana," Mr. Cao said in a statement posted on his Web site.

"I read the versions of the House bill. I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding - if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children."

In the statement, Mr. Cao also said that he had secured a personal commitment from President Obama on health issues important to Louisiana, including disparities in federal reimbursement rates for Medicaid. And while many Democrats complained that tighter restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions had threatened support for the bill on their side, Mr. Cao said that those tougher restrictions encouraged him to support the bill.

It's been noted that Cao was the focus of intense lobbying by all sides of debate. But as a former Roman Catholic priest and a freshman who jumped into politics after Hurricaine Katrina, I tend to believe him when he says his decision was a matter of conscience and what he felt would best serve the people in his destrict.

(Cao, represents the part of the same state as Sen. Mary Landrieu — who apparently does a better job of spouting GOP talking points than Cao — which ranks among the top ten states with the highest percentage of uninsured citizens. While I'm opposed to the Stupak amendment, and believe it will have devastating consequences for millions of women, I have to give it up for a freshman Republican congressman who sees and acknowledges the serious need for health care reform in Louisiana — especially juxtaposed against a Democratic senator who apparently can't.)

And here is where the story gets depressingly familiar. It would be normal for The GOP, or any party, to see a decision like Cao's as a betrayal of party unity and loyalty. The anger of Democrats and progressive directed a Sen. Joe Lieberman and his filibuster blustering is another example. However, the tone of the repsonse from the GOP base ratchets things up considerably.

Matthew Yglesias posted about right-wing twittering in response to Cao's vote.

Representative Joseph Cao is a freshman Republican who won 49.6 percent of the vote against a corrupt incumbent in a district that’s 64% black and has a median income of $25,000. I think it should come as no surprise that someone in that situation might want to break with the GOP leadership now and then. For example, he voted for the health care reform bill last night. For his trouble, he’s being treated to some interesting tweets:

RT @RightBloggerPat: @AnhJosephCao You Bastard piece of shit fuck! GO BACK TO Saigon, South Vietnam where you fucking BELONG GOOK! #TCOT

There’s also a whole bunch of folks who’ve decided that it’d be hilarious to start referring to Rep. Cao as “Mao” because, you see, they’re both responsible for the deaths of millions Asians. Also this.I think the conservative movement is going to continue to struggle in a decreasingly white America.

The tweets Yglesias cited are pretty clear, but pictures may still be worth a thousand words. The first tweeter quoted by Yglesias is still "out," for the time being.

The second tweeter, to whom the first responded has since pulled the shades, but not quickly enough to keep Google Cache from getting a peek. Yglesias doesn't quote this tweet, but I don't see why it shouldn't be seen.

I'm not even going to look at what the Freepers are probably saying. Some other brave soul can venture into that dark corner of the far right. This, mind you comes on the heels of a protest against health care reform where the following posters were prominiently displayed.

The caption reads "National Socialist Healthcare. Dachau, Germany - 1945."

Naturally, Jewish organizations were outraged (as most people would be).

Yesterday the National Jewish Democratic Council's (NJDC) President, David A. Harris, released a statement outlining the outrageous behavior of the crowd at the Tea Party "press conference" sponsored by the GOP House leadership. The crowd held signs noting that "Obama takes orders from the Rothchilds" [sic] and likening the Democratic health care legislation to Nazi Health Care as represented by corpses at the Dachau concentration camp. Contained in NJDC's release was a call to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) to rid Republican events of these inappropriate Holocaust comparisons and outright anti-Semitic messages, and to clearly condemn them once and for all.
The House Republican Leader's press spokesperson replied, "Leader Boehner did not see any such sign. Obviously, it would be grossly inappropriate."
This morning The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reported that these signs and other comparably disgusting ones could not possibly have been missed by Boehner and other GOP members of Congress because they were right in front of the GOP speakers. Moreover, Milbank highlighted the comments of other GOP-sponsored speakers speaking about Reverend Wright brainwashing President Barack Obama to "damn America" and fuming about "death panels."

Another declares "Obama" takes his orders from the Rothschilds.

The reference lends further credence to reports of paranoia and conspiracism on the far-right that'd apparently driving the Republican party. Note: progressives can be heard almost everywhere criticizing the Obama administration for what seems to be a soft-touch approach to Wall street, but almost never will you hear or see them make references to fears about the Illuminati. Even George W. Bush didn't receive this kind of treatment from progressives or progressive leadership.The rest are equally disturbing, and disturbed.

And while is could be argued that most of the anti-Obama, anti-health care reform rantings haven't come from conservative leadership, that leadership — as Paul Krugmam noted, stood silently while these signs and others were proudly and prominently displayed at what was not a protest but officially billed as a "press conference"; one at which the speakers took no questions, but at least one (Rep. Steve King) stopped to autograph one of the signs. (Granted, political leaders who can't make it through the pledge of allegiance without flubbing it, or tell the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence might fail to see the placards held aloft just a few rows from the stage.)

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we've grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption "National Socialist Healthcare." It was grotesque - and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.
The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn't a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership - in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is "mild." The signs were "inappropriate," said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, "conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful."

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

(Boehner's office, for what it's worth, says he didn't see any such signs, but that they were highly inappropriate )

As noted above, Dana Millbank pointed out that the signs couldn't have been missed by GOP leadership. Ira N. Forman names the rest of the GOP lawmakers in attendance.

Boehner and the other GOP members present -- including GOP House Whip Eric Cantor, and Representatives Bachman (MN), Foxx (VA), Hensarling (TX), King (IA), Broun (GA), Schmidt (OH), Cassidy (LA), Akin (MO), and Carter (TX) -- can no longer hide behind weasel words like that they "did not see any such sign." This was their press conference and the signs were right in front of their faces. The spelling-impaired "Rothchilds" sign-holder was spouting nonsense about a "Jewish plot to introduce the anti-Christ." These were their own speakers spouting outright lies. This was their political base. These types of disgusting, inappropriate Holocaust comparisons and hate filled, paranoid messages have been a part of GOP and conservative events since the carefully planned town hall meetings of last summer.

It's also worth noting that this was all happening not to far away from — in fact, within reasonable walking distance of — the Holocaust Museum, which was the site of a deadly shooting, carried by a white supremacist who posted and found acceptance at Free Republic, and who would probably have felt right at home at this gathering.

Or the one before that. Or the one before that. Or...

The Morality of Health Care Reform, pt. 6

Terrance Heath — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:04:25 -0800

(The sixth in of a series of seven.)

Nothing in Common

If the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is true, then a couple of images might sum up the debate of over health care reform, and prove representative of the opposing sides.

[Via Preemptive Karma.]

[Via Wikimedia Commons.]

President Obama also defined it during his speech to the joint houses of Congress: that debate over health care reform is really a debate — and a struggle, even — over the moral character of the nation. In other words, it's another part of the process of choosing what kind of country we want to be.

I’ve thought about that phrase quite a bit in recent days—the character of our country. One of the unique and wonderful things about America has always been our self-reliance, our rugged individualism, our fierce defense of freedom and our healthy skepticism of government. And figuring out the appropriate size and role of government has always been a source of rigorous and, yes, sometimes angry debate. That’s our history.

For some of Ted Kennedy’s critics, his brand of liberalism represented an affront to American liberty. In their minds, his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government.

But those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here—people of both parties—know that what drove him was something more. His friend Orrin Hatch—he knows that. They worked together to provide children with health insurance. His friend John McCain knows that. They worked together on a Patient’s Bill of Rights. His friend Chuck Grassley knows that. They worked together to provide health care to children with disabilities.

On issues like these, Ted Kennedy’s passion was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience. It was the experience of having two children stricken with cancer. He never forgot the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick. And he was able to imagine what it must be like for those without insurance, what it would be like to have to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent, there is something that could make you better, but I just can’t afford it.

That large-heartedness—that concern and regard for the plight of others—is not a partisan feeling. It’s not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character—our ability to stand in other people’s shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

If the two sign-holders above represent the two sides of the health care reform debate, the president filled the gap between the those two points of the political spectrum, and attempted to deconstruct the false dichotomy between "standing on your own two feet" and "walking a mile in someone else's shoes" — a necessary act of dealing with crises that test the limits of "rugged individualism," our capacity for (here comes that word again) empathy, and can't be solved by either alone.

In the previous post in this series, and in another post, I suggested or hinted at two ideas that I didn't state outright, choosing instead to explore them separately in hopes of putting them together in some final piece of writing, and I've gotten it down to one sentence: Thirty years or so of dominant conservative economic policy has not only created crises too big to be solved by "rugged individualism" or empathy along, but come close to destroying the one concept that might lead to real solutions: the idea of a common good.

What Do You Mean, "We"?

Somewhere between "We Can Do It," "We Shall Overcome" and "Yes We Can," Americans have gone gone from being anything close to resembling "We the People" to having nothing in common; least of all a common good.

This is not a new observation. (Many others have written about it in the past few months, and I'll quote quote them liberally here when they've already said what I want to say — and better than I would say it.) It's just one that bears repeating, as even in the course of the health care reform debate lawmakers are having exchanges like the one between Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

As the Senate Finance Committee moved into its fourth day of deliberations over the health care bill, tensions continued to rise.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), broke new ground defending an amendment he'd proposed that struck language from the bill defining which benefits employers are required to cover -- in this case, basic maternity care.

"I don't need maternity care," Kyl said. "So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive."

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), interrupted Kyl: "I think your mom probably did."

The amendment was defeated, nine to 14.

As Ellen Goodman pointed out, as if in response to Kyl's remark that his mother may have needed maternity care "more than 60 years ago," his wife and daughter probably did too, much more recently than the day the congressman came into the world. So, too, might any number of women — who didn't choose to be born with a uterus, as Jonathan Cohn (who, like Kyl didn't choose to be born with the Y chromosome that ultimately exempts him from needing medical care). The same, as I (also born with a Y chromosome that exempts me from needing such benefits) pointed out, goes for women who are raped, pregnant, or victims of domestic violence.

Neither I, nor Cohn or Kyl will ever need maternal care, or be denied insurance because of pregnancy. But as Stabenow pointed out to Kyl, there are people in his life — people he presumably cares about — who have needed such benefits and may need them again. Likewise, I'll never need maternity care, but my mom did. My sister did. My nieces will. And a number of women I care about have and will again. The same can be said for just about any health issue; not just those specific to women, but that can affect us all.

Goodman writes that Kyl's statement offered "one brief glimpse into the mind of a politician who doesn’t quite see women’s health concerns as equal to his own." It's reasonable to extend that to say that perhaps he doesn't see anyone's health concerns as equal to, or connected to his own. I might add that Kyl's remarks make it clear that for him "we" doesn't extend much further than himself and perhaps those in his immediate family.

But, as Jonathan Cohn makes clear, when it comes to health and health care reform "we" needs to be much, much bigger — for all of us.

Kyl was born with a "Y" gene. For this, he's earned the right to pay lower health insurance premiums?

To be sure, not all medical expenses are completely out of our control. Lifestyle choices can certainly influence everything from whether we get heart attacks to whether we (or our partners) get pregnant. That's one reason that some financial incentives to encourage healthy behavior, like charging higher premiums to smokers, make sense.

But there's a great deal over which we have little control, from genetic anomalies to random car accidents to economic circumstances in childhood. That means every single one of us face the risk of substantial or even catastrophic medical bills.

Sharing that financial burden collectively is not just the sensible thing to do. It's the right thing to do.

Kyl's response, both in word and spirit, are the essence of the point of view in the first photograph above: "Your health. Your problem." Some women need maternity care? So what? He doesn't, and if any of the women in his family need it, it's likely he'll be sure that they get it. If somebody else needs it and can't get it, that's not his problem. I mean, he might donate a few dollars to help someone out who really deserved it, but beyond that why should he be concerned? He's got his, and will take care of his own. Anyone else isn't really his concern. What does anyone else's health issues have to do with him , anyway?

We and They

My point isn't to pick on Kyl. He's not alone in his views, after all. As noted before, his views are echoed in various places all over the country, and on issues ranging from health care reform to mortgage reduction, public education, and worker's rights — as Alicia Morgan learned from overhearing Cable Guy's" "Don't work at Wal-Mart" routine.

You'll hear conservatives say, "If you don't want to work at Wal-Mart, then get an education and work hard and you won't have to." Pull yourself up by your bootstraps; put your nose to the grindstone; have some self-discipline. The old 'personal responsibility' routine.

What that does not address is the question, "If I don't work there, then who else should be working there?"

In other words, a job that pays so little that a full-time worker is still below the poverty line and is eligible for welfare is fine and dandy - as long as it's not me working there?

That's the essence of the conservative worldview: as long as I've got mine, I don't care if you have yours. The idea of everyone pursuing his or her own self-interest, then by the invisible hand, the self-interest of all will be maximized, or in the parlance of the Eighties, "Greed is good!" - is the one-size-fits-all answer to poverty, to injustice, to inequality. But what it boils down to in real life is "I've got mine." The idea that every person that works full-time is due enough compensation to support themselves, let alone a family, doesn't even enter into the calculation. It's okay for other people to be underpaid, overworked, taken advantage of. All that matters is - it's not me.

"I got mine" is really an Americanization of the British "I'm All Right Jack."

Attitude of "every man for himself, survival of the fittest, devil take the hindmost", ... but also, that all the possible advantages (however gained), success (however won) and satisfaction (whatever the cost to others) belong to me first!" Narrow-focus, narrow-gauge pseudo-Darwinian selfishness glorified as a sensible philosophy of society and life.

It's translated back on our side of the pond, and spews forth from the mouths of health care reform opponents like Katy Abram, who confronted Arlen Spector in a town hall meeting.

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The anger is not just about health care, Abram told Specter. Markfromireland elaborates:

An increasingly hard-up working and middle class who were already living in terror of dislocation and poverty are now seeing threats to their well-being amplified by recession. The American dream (and reality) for such people was expressed through ownership of property. However meagre their actual possessions may be those possessions are theirs ... Anything that smacks of "socialism" really does seem to be both alien and menacing to such people.

In a tearful appearance on Glenn Beck's radio show after a flood of media scrutiny, hate e-mail and a name-calling phone call, Abram whined, "They're trying to set up the normal people of this country."

..."These programs are being funded by me, my husband, our friends, our family," Abram complained to Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's Hardball. No acknowledgment of any contributions by the Others. Normal people's property, real Americans' taxes may help pay for programs that benefit abnormal, lesser Americans. That's socialism.

There is no "we" in this myopic view, no welcome for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of fellow Americans, much less immigrants. There is only my family, my friends, my neighborhood, my church and my ethnic group, a view that is sadly widespread. America is for people like me. Others need not apply. I'm all right, Jack.

Well, there is a "we" in Abrams' view, but there are a great many people it doesn't include, much like the Kipling verse that says in the first stanza "All the people like us are We, And every one else is They," and at by the last stanza arrives at "All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We. And every one else is They..." In her view "We" encompasses people like her, and her husband, her friends, and her family — "the normal people of America." Everyone else, particularly those aren't like her and those who can't afford health care, is "They."

As Anna N. at Jezebel noted, Abrams "does get that some people can't afford health insurance," but believes that "the goodness of people" should be enough to take care of such problem, even though she herself knows how naive that is.

Goodness, to quote Mae West, has little to do with it. And goodness will hardly be enough.

Us and Them

I'm not doubting, mind you that there is goodness in people, but in a crisis goodness is often in short supply and hard to come by for some people, like jobs and health insurance. Even in reasonably good times, it can be inhibited by a conservative worldview mentioned earlier in this series, which holds that material success and well-being is an indicator of moral virtue, and thus implies that the lack thereof is a sign of moral weakness. It follows then, that giving aid merely encourages moral weakness. Extend that a bit, and you have conservative pundits addressing the plight of those left behind in Katrina's wake not as shameful omission to be corrected, but as a "teachable moment;" the lesson being, "This is what you get when you're poor," and this implication being "This is all the poor deserve."

And that's during reasonably good times. As I noted in earlier, a good bit of the anger seen over health care reform is coming from people whose communities and families have been particularly devastated by the current economic crisis, but also worn down by 30 years of "free trade" policies that freed them from their jobs (along with decent wages and benefits) the jobs from U.S. soil.

Sure, their cries of "I want my country back" at times probably do reflect a nostalgia for an America in which they could at least be sure the guy in the White House looked like them. But the country they want back — where they could count on jobs that enabled them to take care of their families, educate their children, and build some degree of financial security — wasn't lost on November 4, 2008, or on January 20, 2009.

That America was lost by degrees, as policies changed, jobs disappeared, corporate profits grew. That loss had the dual effect of increasing economic inequality, and increasing a tolerance for inequality that grew into a "mean streak in the U.S. Mainstream." Hardened into a culture of cruelty, it cuts off our concern for others.

People in these positions bemoan the growth in inequality. They all agree that there should be greater redistribution from the rich to the poor. But in almost every case, "rich" is defined as someone richer than the speaker, and "inequality" tends to mean their own sense of being unequal. No one I talked to about this, left-leaning or not, felt any enthusiasm for paying more towards some general good. They not only feel under financial pressure, but they are increasingly conscious of living in a harsh world in which they must secure their own pensions, pay for their own dental treatment and care in old age, and attempt to protect their children from the consequences of living in an era of global competitiveness. Everyone is now aware that as the rewards for reaching the top have grown exponentially, so the penalties for failing have grown more savage. As one Labour-voting father said, inequality eats away at the spirit of community. He feels he can't risk his children falling to the bottom, and he wants to use what he has to help them, rather than contributing more to the common pot.

This closing down of concern for others is echoed by Scandinavian research. Academics discovered the middle classes supported greater equality of opportunity in education only as long as the middle class was expanding - in other words, only on condition that their children's social position was not threatened by others' upward mobility. Last week researchers at Oxford University concluded that Britain was in just that position. There was a big expansion of the middle classes from the 60s to the 90s, but the academics warned it was a one-off event. From now on, any upward mobility would have to be matched by someone else's downward mobility.

What this implies is that the traditional left denunciation of inequality may not be the rallying call it was. More of us are feeling the pain of inequality, but we are increasingly fearful that we, individually, might suffer if we are asked to redress it. It's why the Tories' plans to tax non-doms and cut inheritance tax were so instantly popular. They appealed both to people's indignation and their self-protective instincts.

Conservative opponents of reform in health care and the financial sector, too, have appealed to people's sense of indignation and their self-protective instincts, so successfully that they have persuaded many of their constituents to vehemently oppose policy changes that would potentially benefit them most — health care reform job creation via the stimulus. Their success has been due in part to the reality that we do not live in the same America, and haven't for decades. They are trying, through opposition on the very changes their constituents need most, to reinforce the borders between the Americas that "We" and "They" call home; between the Americas that belong to "Us" and "Them"; the Americas that are "Yours" and "Mine."

But If they fail to stop health care reform — that is, if progressives succeed in passing real health care reform — the borders between those Americas will weaken. And if weakened, they will eventually yield; opening the way to an America where we may find solutions to the problems that exist in "Yours" and "Mine."

Ours.

Don't Know or Don't Care?

Terrance Heath — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:07:02 -0800

House Republicans have presented a health care reform "plan" that doesn't fix our broken health care system (but might make it worse), and (according to the CBO) doesn't do much to fix the deficit conservatives say they're so concerned about. So, is it a surprise that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) doesn't know how many people in his district are uninsured?

Is it that he doesn't know, or doesn't care, and thus hasn't bothered to look? The answer is pretty easy to find: 83,000. Does he know, I wonder, how many of his constituents are on this list?

Probably not. His fellow Republicans apparently don't care to know.

So: Doesn't' know? Doesn't care? Or doesn't care to know?

What Do They Want?

Terrance Heath — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:58:45 -0800

First, it was Sen. Landerieu's nonsense. Now we get this from Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Enough is enough. When Democrats start parroting Republican talking points, they are showing us who they are. We need to treat accordingly. Especially when their take on health care reform is pretty much the same as the GOP's, in terms of outcome.

For the Republicans have finally come up with some semblance of a plan for health care reform. I'll give them credit, though. I, among others, had derided them for failing to come up with anything.

Steve Benen asks a question about the Republican health care reform plan — or lack thereof — that I’m certain I’ve seen answered already.

The House Republican leadership "guaranteed" that they would offer an alternative health care reform bill. If my count is right, that was 134 days ago.

Asked about when Americans can expect to see the GOP plan, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said it’s "pretty difficult" for Republicans to come up with a "solid plan," because the minority caucus is "not quite sure how the majority intends to proceed."

I’m not sure what that’s even supposed to mean. Republicans started putting together their health care reform proposal in June. They’ve had plenty of time to meet behind closed doors and craft the superior plan that will prove the seriousness with which the GOP takes this issue. What’s the holdup?

Boehner wants to know first how Democrats intend to proceed? Well, here’s a tip for the Minority Leader: Democrats will probably hold a vote on the reform bill they’ve spent the last year putting together. The question is, how does he intend to proceed?

The answer is that they don’t intend to proceed. Because they can’t proceed.

A solution is necessary only if there’s a problem to be solved, and conservative politicial philosophy kind of prohibits them from perceiving a problem. Thus the don’t have a solution because they can’t come up with one that: (a) actually solves the problem in question by guaranteeing everyone access to quality, affordable health care and (b) rigidly adheres to the tenets of the political philosophy.

But they finally did it.

Republicans haven't released full details of the party's bill, but Boehner said the legislative proposal would be made public in the next couple of days.

The bill would allow insurance firms to sell policies across state lines, permit small businesses to pool together to bring down costs they face, implement changes to medical malpractices, and give state governments more flexibility to pursue rule changes in their states.

The absence of a requirement to end the practice of insurers being allowed to deny coverage to people who are already ill or have pre-existing conditions would be a significant difference between Democratic and Republican health-care overhaul proposals directly impacting the insurance industry.

(This article appear briefly on the Wall Street Journal website, then mysteriously disappeared.)

The bill apparently does more than preserve the status quo, it actually makes it worse.

Specifically, he points to the kind of high-risk pools that many states have established for those who find themselves uninsurable as a result of a serious illness. That is not a new idea--some states have had these pools for three decades--or a solution for many. These pools already exist in more than 30 states, but they tend to be too expensive for those with limited means to buy into. And often, people cannot get into them for as long as a year after they apply.

When my brother developed kidney disease and his health insurance refused to pay to treat it, I looked into Texas' high-risk pool and discovered it would be far out of his reach, with premiums that typically run twice as expensive as regular insurance policies. California's high-risk pool has been a disaster, covering only 2% of the medically uninsurable.

A lot worse, perhaps.

"A House Republican health-care bill wouldn't seek to prevent health-insurance companies from denying sick people insurance," the first paragraph of the Wall Street Journal's preview of the latest Republican health-care reform alternative says. "Republicans also wouldn't prevent insurers from ending policies once an individual becomes seriously ill," reads the fifth. On the bright side, the Republican bill would allow insurers to base themselves in whichever state has the weakest regulatory standards and then sell policies built around those rules nationwide. If you've ever thought that your insurance was too comprehensive, too straightforward, and contained too few loopholes that you didn't learn about until you feel terribly ill, then this is the plan for you!

I'm tired of doing this. I'm tired of pretending that political documents are the same as policy documents. Republicans have not released a plan to reform the health-care system. They have released a plan (pdf) to have people stop bugging them about releasing a plan to reform the health-care system. The two are not the same thing.

But, according to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, covering the uninsured was never the point — which may be why Republican leadership can't even say how many people their "plan" would cover.

The point of health care reform, apparently, isn't to cover people like Anne Johnson.

Anne Johnson lost coverage for herself and her 18-year-old son in February when she lost her job as a secretary at a solar energy company, where she was earning about $25,000 per year.

Shortly before she was laid off, a cardiologist told her she needs her aortic valve replaced, but without insurance she can't afford the surgery. She is supposed to get checkups every six months, but that is also too expensive - so she has put them off. Her last visit to the cardiologist was in January, so she is already three months overdue.

"Right now I have no idea what type of condition I'm in," Johnson said.

Nor is the point to cover people like William Koehler.

In 2003, William Koehler of Pittsburgh, Pa. lost his job as an electronics technician. He lost his health insurance, too, but he'd been lucky enough to have the defibrillator battery in his heart changed just the previous year. No insurer would cover him except for one company which refused to cover anything related to his arrhythmia, says his sister.

He survived as long as his battery did, dying on March 7, 2009 at 57. His sister, Georgeanne Koehler, has become an activist, telling the story about how her brother died to anyone who will listen. On Thursday, she traveled to Washington, D.C. from Pittsburgh to join a protest outside a conference for America's Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying group for the insurance industry.

"I blame insurance companies, I blame his doctor, and I blame politicians," Koehler said to a gaggle or reporters asking about her brother's death after the protest.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, she explained that after he was laid off, her brother found part-time work delivering pies for Vocelli Pizza, putting in about 30 hours a week. In 2007, as he was closing up shop, he collapsed. His coworkers called an ambulance, and his sisters joined him at the hospital.

"The doctor said that the defibrillator battery was extremely low, and he needed studies done, but not as an inpatient," said Koehler, who is 63 and works as a unit clerk at a hospital in Pittsburgh. Asked if he needed to pay for treatment upfront, her brother's doctor said he would, and that it would cost thousands of dollars.

"I'm a pizza delivery guy, I don't have insurance," Koehler recalled her brother saying. She said the cardiologist walked to the side of the bed and asked her brother if he put oil in his car. When he said he did, the doctor told him that's what he needed to do for his heart.

"You're talking about a $8.50 can of oil and my battery's going to be ten thousand dollars," Koehler recalled her brother saying. "The doctor said, 'Get your priorities straight and you'll come up with the money.'"

Instead, the lesson William Koehler took from the episode, his sister said, was that "You have to have money to have your health." Over the next two years he'd have episodes where he couldn't catch his breath but he always shrugged off going to the hospital.

Koehler — a lifelong Republican — didn't have money, so he didn't or couldn't have his health. Two years later, he died on his way home from work.

The point isn't to cover people like Johnson and Koehler, and so nothing in the Republican plan guarantees them coverage. They might get coverage, or they might not. It might be affordable, or it might not. It might cover them when they get sick, or it might not.

If the point was — as they say — lowering costs the question remains: For whom? The beneficiaries of the status quo are the insurance companies. The beneficiaries of the Republican plan are the insurance companies. That much they can guarantee.

Either way, the health care status quo is unsustainable. So keeping it and allowing it to get isn't much better than legislating and deregulating it into getting worse. As it is, the status quo is bad enough.

When Lieberman first started making noise about filibustering health care reform, I asked myself, "What does Joe Lieberman want?" If I were feeling particularly cynical, I'd say he wants to keep the money rolling in.

If Democrats are disappointed by Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any healthcare reform bill that includes a public option, they shouldn't be. Despite all of his past promises to support universal healthcare, nothing was more predictable than the Connecticut senator's fealty to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

...The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

At the time she joined the public relations and lobbying conglomerate in the spring of 2005, she expressed the touching hope that she would somehow be able to help those in need. "I have had a lifelong commitment to helping people gain better healthcare," she said in a press release. "I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal." Less than a year later, having pocketed $77,000 in salary, she quit without explanation -- just as her husband was facing a tough primary that he would eventually lose. Throughout the campaign, Hadassah Lieberman, her husband and their spokespersons explicitly refused to discuss her professional activities, except to note that she had not been required to register as a lobbyist.

And what better way to do that than to make sure your benefactors — your real constituents, the insurance industry — are the chief beneficiaries of your efforts? After all, if they get what they want, you get what you want.

And the rest of us get? What, exactly?

Failure is Their Only Option

Terrance Heath — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:40:44 -0700

Steve Benen asks a question about the Republican health care reform plan — or lack thereof — that I'm certain I've seen answered already.

The House Republican leadership "guaranteed" that they would offer an alternative health care reform bill. If my count is right, that was 134 days ago.

Asked about when Americans can expect to see the GOP plan, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said it's "pretty difficult" for Republicans to come up with a "solid plan," because the minority caucus is "not quite sure how the majority intends to proceed."

I'm not sure what that's even supposed to mean. Republicans started putting together their health care reform proposal in June. They've had plenty of time to meet behind closed doors and craft the superior plan that will prove the seriousness with which the GOP takes this issue. What's the holdup?

Boehner wants to know first how Democrats intend to proceed? Well, here's a tip for the Minority Leader: Democrats will probably hold a vote on the reform bill they've spent the last year putting together. The question is, how does he intend to proceed?

The answer is that they don't intend to proceed. Because they can't proceed.

A solution is necessary only if there's a problem to be solved, and conservative politicial philosophy kind of prohibits them from perceiving a problem. Thus the don't have a solution because they can't come up with one that: (a) actually solves the problem in question by guaranteeing everyone access to quality, affordable health care and (b) rigidly adheres to the tenets of the political philosophy.

But I knew I'd seen it answered better than this somewhere. Then I realized that Benen answered it himself, a couple of days earlier.

I suspect part of the problem is that Republicans have noticed that health care reform is ... what's the word ... tricky. Can GOP lawmakers come up with a proposal that covers the insured, offers consumer protections insurers don't like, doesn't raise taxes, lowers the deficit, and ensures exactly zero government intervention in the free market? It seems unlikely.

And yet, way back on June 17, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the point man on the alternative GOP plan, publicly proclaimed, "I guarantee you we will provide you with a bill."

It's a "guarantee" Republicans are struggling to follow through on.

To be sure, I don't necessarily blame Republicans for refusing to unveil an alternative health care plan. Producing a GOP reform proposal would not only give Democrats a target, it would offer people a chance to compare the two approaches. In a side-by-side match-up, it's hardly a stretch to think the Dems' plan would be better. Much better.

I even took a shot at it myself.

Whether or not it's a crisis that millions of Americans are uninsured or underinsured, that thousands lose their health insurance every day, or that tens of thousands die every year because they lack health insurance is a matter of perspective. The same goes for the economic crisis, the foreclosure crisis, or any other crisis.

Depending on your perspective, there's nothing wrong with hundreds of thousands, or even millions losing their homes to foreclosure. (Even if deregulating the finance sector made it easier to sell them time bombs, in the form of mortgages, that went off long after the people who really matter made an easy buck and moved on.) There's nothing wrong with millions of people having no health insurance, and thus no access to affordable, quality care. There's nothing wrong, because it's all right, and there's no need to do anything about it.

That's why I have to disagree with the following assertion, from Simon Johnson and James Kwak.

No one is against expanding health coverage on principle. As we come down to crunch time, the health-reform debate is all about money.

We can't assume that "no one is against expanding health coverage on principle," because it's flat wrong. Just like there were plenty of people who were against mortgage modification on principle, and just like there were plenty of people who were against the economic stimulus on principle, there are plenty of people who disagree with expanding healthcare coverage. And they disagree with the very principle that everyone should be covered.

...Drop dead. That's the overall message of conservatives who (a) see nothing wrong with the status quo in our health care system, because they (b) see nothing wrong with millions of people having no insurance and no access to care.

Seen from that perspective, it's clear that the people who confronted GOP lawmakers in townhalls were talking about their wants not their needs. As such, they got put in their "place," for whining about privileges they clearly haven't earned because they can't afford them — like the woman Tom Coburn schooled (to thunderous applause) for wanting help for her husband's medical problems.

They haven't presented a health care reform plan because they've already told us their plan.

The answer is the same as when McCain was asked by Republicans never tried to reform health care when they held both the White House and Congress: because reform is only necessary if something's wrong. And they didn't see anything wrong with the status quo in this case.

In truth the GOP really doesn't need to present a plan, because we already know what it is: failure — either for health care reform or the plan they'd present if they had one — is their only option.

From Crash to Meltdown in 80 Years

Terrance Heath — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:26:14 -0700

It's was 80 years ago this week that the Crash of 1929 kicked off the Great Depression.

Not quite 79 years later, the fall of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, sent the stock market into a meltdown precipitated by the crises of such Wall Street Giants as Bear Stears and AIG, among others.

Comparisons between now and then are, of course, inevitable.

Last year, I interviewed economist and author Robert Kuttner, who had this to say about the similarities between 1929 and 2008.

TERRANCE HEATH: In his column about the 79th anniversary of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, Professor Maury Klein asked, "Is it 1929 all over again?" Is it?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Yes, this is 1929 all over again. For the same reasons. The crash of 1929 was caused by too much speculation, with too much borrowed money, with too many conflicts of interest and too little transparency. And in the 1930's the New Deal mostly repaired that by much tighter regulation of banks, much stricter supervision of conflict of interest, much greater controls on leverage and much grater disclosure for investors.

But it fixed the problem for the known universe of financial institutions, and after the '70s all kinds of new exotic financial instruments were invented. And because deregulation came back into fashion, and the right wing really took over the conversation as well as government regulators did not keep up with the new instruments that Wall Street invented. And so all the same kinds of uses crept back in, and it took about 20 years until the house of cards was so high and so rickety that you then had the same kind of crash.

TH: When did the rolling back of those New Deal measures start?

RK: Well, it's interesting; it happened in fits and starts. Some of it was deliberate and some of it was simply people taking advantage of other things that had happened. For instance, in the period between 1971 and 1973 the Nixon administration dismantled dismantled one of the main pillars of Bretton Woods from 1944, which had created a regime of fixed exchange rates and along the way prevented a great deal of international speculation in currencies

So, after the 1970s little by little you had a whole category of speculation that had been prohibited by the ground rules obtained in the '50s and '60s, namely a lot of currently speculation. You had the so-called eurodollar market of dollars that existed in Europe that are not really regulated by anybody.

Then in the '70s also you had Wall Street taking something that had been the monopoly of Fannie Mae back when Fannie Mae was a public institution and part of the government, namely the securitization of mortgage, and privatizing it, and having lower standards than Fannie Mae did.

Again this was OK from the first decade or so but then when securitized mortgages rendezvoused with subprime and subprime rendezvoused with contracts written against the risk of bonds going bad, the whole house of cards just goes higher and higher and because in the '80s and the '90s Democrats fingerprints were on this, too. Regulators were not really interested in keeping up with these new risk products that Wall Street invented.

So, then in 1999, the capstone of this is the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. One other aspect of this was Greenspan's failure to enforce the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act of 1994, which, had Greenspan enforced it, subprime never would have happened, because that legislation required anybody who made mortgage loans to use sound underwriting standards. And you had Democrats and Republicans preventing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating many categories of derivatives.

So it was in the air, the idea that whatever Wall Street invents is by definition efficient, by definition virtuous, by definition self-regulating, and little by little a whole parallel banking system gets created that is beyond the scope of what the regulators can monitor.

Of course, there are countless takes on what happened then, what's happening now, and the similarities (and/or differences) between the two. The New York Times published this timeline of what led up to the Meltdown of 2008, and I put together this surprisingly popular timeline about a year ago.

Meltdown 2008 on Dipity.

This week, PBS is running a special series about the 1920's — the decade that preceded the crash — and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Check the schedule of upcoming broadcasts for the next chance to watch it.

Last year, the History Channel ran "Crash: The Next Great Depression?" impressed me as the one of the best explanations on the similarities and differences between 1929 and today. Perhaps that's because, besides a bit of lip service paid to conservatives New Deal Denialism, it pretty much echoed what progressives have said about the causes of the current crisis.

Finally, there's nothing like an anniversary to get people started on their versions of what happened then and what should be happening now. One one hand, the run the gamut from blaming bubbles to pinning it on everything from excessive regulation to civil rights laws.

I'm no economist, but I tend to agree with the assessment that some important pieces of today's puzzle are income disparity, wage disparity, and their role in creating credit bubbles.

Wage stagnation has forced workers to look for other ways to maintain the same standard of living. Easy credit provided that opportunity, but not without severe damage to the family balance sheet. When the credit bubble burst and housing prices began to drop, millions of people were wiped out, stuck in homes with negative equity and zero savings.

Stagnant wages, shrinking personal savings, and record household debt, have created conditions similar to those in the Great Depression. The symptoms have been masked by the trillions in monetary and fiscal stimulus, and by the cheery talk in the media. But people are poorer and they are acting like it. Author and economist James K. Galbraith explains why this may be a problem in the future:

"The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis—an integrated, long-term economic threat—rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That’s the thinking.

But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can’t qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.

In the past year I've heard the need for consumers to start spending and banks to start lending (something they're doing less of, despite the bailout) if there's to be an economic recovery. What I haven't heard addressed much is just how this combination leads to anything but another bubble bursting if people borrow more and spend more (as is supposedly needed to get the recovery going), but aren't earning any more — unless the idea is for people to spend more, borrow more, and accept a lower standard of living. Permanently.

We know that Wall Street is doing quite well. Record profits and huge bonuses are back, even as unemployment is soaring, foreclosure reach record numbers, and the rest of America waits for the recovery to start.

What does all this mean for the economy as a whole? It raises the fundamental question of where demand will come from to get us out of this hole. If so many Americans are losing their jobs and wages, you have to wonder who will be returning to the malls.

That same Bank of America Merrill Lynch report notes cheerfully that 42 percent of consumer spending before the meltdown came from the top-earning 10 percent of Americans (not too surprising given that the top 10 percent was raking in half of total earnings) and the top 10 percent continues to do relatively well. So, says Bank of America Merrill, we can rely on the spending of the top 10 percent to get the economy moving again. Indeed, they conclude, Congress and the White House should be careful not to raise taxes on the top 10 percent, lest the consuming ardor of these most privileged members of our society be dampened.

This logic is morally and economically indefensible. If we've learned anything from the Great Recession-Mini Depression of the last 18 months, it's that the skewing of income and wealth to the top has made our economy far less stable. When the majority of middle-class and poor Americans are either losing their jobs or feel threatened by job loss, and when those who still have jobs are experiencing flat or declining wages, there's simply no way to get the economy back on track. The track we were on -- featuring stagnant median wages, widening inequality, and job insecurity -- got us into this mess in the first place.

I tend to agree with Nomi Prins, who knows something about Wall Street.

Eighty years ago today, the stock market took a dive of more than 11 percent, a move that is considered the start of the Great Depression. The crash, like our own, was a wakeup call for change, says Nomi Prins—but Obama isn’t heeding the lessons of FDR and changing the banking landscape.

President Obama would do well to heed the notion of being true to Main Street economic conditions, rather than risk losing the next election by overlooking them and considering the rising markets and stabilizing banks as a sign of general strength.

Call it a dying cat bounce, but we should heed the lessons of Black Tuesday. That stock market dive, 80 years ago Thursday, was a wakeup call for change. Yet today, bank regulation is dialed back to pre-Black Tuesday conditions, as the economy for real people is similarly faltering. If we don’t make lasting changes to the banking landscape now, we will see more pain—not in 80 years, but in the next couple.

If there's no recovery for the real economy, there's no recovery. Just another bubble, and a bigger mess when it inevitably bursts.

Are You a Pre-Existing Condition?

Terrance Heath — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:32:01 -0700

I've referenced this story in a previous post, about a woman who was denied health insurance because (a) she was raped, (b) sought prophylactic HIV/AIDS treatment because it was unknown if her rapist wore a condom, and (c) sought therapy for the psychological problems resulting from being raped (in her case agoraphobia, which made her afraid to leave her home. Because of all the above, she became uninsurable.

The story itself is a jaw-dropper, especially when you consider that she's an insurance agent. She knows something about the health insurance business, and she couldn't find anyone who would sell her a policy. This interview with Anderson Cooper puts a face on the story

She actually worked as a health insurance agent, counseling other people on their insurance benefits, while unable to get coverage herself. For more, check out A Woman is Not a Pre-Existing Condition.

Like Tammy Wynette once sang, sometimes it's hard to be a woman.

Why would an insurance company deny a woman coverage because she's been raped and is doing the right thing for her health by seeking treatment for conditions resulting from the rape? It doesn't seem to make sense at first, that needing care and trying to get the care you need can cause you to lose access to that care.

It seems a bit paradoxical until you think about it. Then you realize that, as William Fisher pointed out, health insurers are not in the caring business.

Now, maybe I have a simplistic mind, but frankly I don't understand why health care and insurance companies keep appearing in the same sentences.
After all, these two things are not the same. Insurance companies are not in the health care business. They are in the risk business. They assess risk and then charge you a fee - it's called a premium - to protect you against that risk. Just like your car or your home insurance. If your car gets wrecked, the insurance company doesn't make it better; it gives you money so that you can make it better. Same with home insurance; if a storm tears your roof off, your insurance company will send a contractor to fix it.
So it is with health insurance. Health insurance companies don't do a thing to make you well if you're sick. That's the work that's done by physicians, nurses, hospitals and clinics. And these two groups - health care professionals and health insurance companies - are far from buddies. In fact, they're pretty intense enemies.
The reason is that the health insurance companies, being in the risk business, do whatever they can to reduce their risk. So, they are more than likely to deny all or parts of the care your doctor is prescribing to make you better. Their loyalties are to their shareholders. Shareholders who've seen a run of great profits, based on ever-rising premiums, based in turn on generous government subsidies and an almost total lack of competition among all these companies.

So, from the insurance companies' perspective a woman is a pre-existing condition, and there's little she can do about it. One woman, while discussing the story above, joking asked me "So, if I get a hysterectomy (assuming it's covered) would I no longer be a pre-existing condition?"

And the not-so-funny answer is, well, no. For starters, there's a certain level of risk in having a hysterectomy operation. So it's unlikely an insurance company would cover it. Plus, a woman who's had a hysterectomy is still a woman, and a woman who's had a hysterectomy can still be raped, and thus denied coverage. She can be denied coverage for being a victim of domestic violence, because eight states plus the District of Columbia allow it to be treated as a pre-existing condition, and eight of of sixteen insurers use that right to deny insurance to victims of domestic violence. [via Corrente.]

Granted, that would eliminate the "risk"of becoming pregnant, and thus eliminate the possibility of being denied insurance for being pregnant. (Every pregnancy, after all, carried some degree of risk to the health of the mother or the fetus.) And that would eliminate the likelihood of being denied insurance for having a c-section, and the indignity of having your insurance company tell you to get sterilized if you want coverage.

The letter from the insurance company, available here in PDF, must be read to be believed. The two stunner paragraphs read:

The plan you applied for is an association group plan and is medically underwritten. As a general rule our underwriting guidelines require that we issue coverage with a rider excluding benefits for caesarian section delivery for three years. However, the Colorado Division of Insurance no longer allows us to place that rider for the individual. Unfortunately, we cannot collect sufficient premiums to offset the risk of paying for a repeat C-section deliver during the first three years of coverage.

In order to consider coverage without a rider, we require that certain requirements be met. One requirement is that some form of sterilization has occurred since the caesarean delivery. Also, women age 40 and over who had their last child two years or more prior to applying for coverage will not require a rider. Unfortunately, since you have not met either of these requirements, it would have been necessary to place the C-section rider.

It's unclear whether "some form of sterilization" includes the possibility of her husband having a vasectomy. (Though that also would eliminate the additional risks like having a child who is deemed uninsurable for being a "breath holder.") but the insurance company's letter does underscore Fisher's point that health insurance companies are not in the health care business.

They're in the risk business, and the lower you level of risk is in their eyes, the better you look as a customer because you're likely to pay your premiums and not need much more health care than an occasional check-up. It's kind of like insuring your car, if you're a low-risk customer who car isn't likely to need much more than the occasional tune-up.

And it seems that's where the insurance model falls apart. While talking about health care reform over dinner, my husband (who happens to be a doctor) made the same observation as Fisher: health insurers want you to use health insurance the same way you use home insurance and auto insurance.

My immediate response was, "That's impossible." Health insurance can't work the same way that home insurance or auto insurance work. I say this as someone who hadn't owned a car for more than ten years, and who lived without one for nearly seven or eight years (before I married someone who owned a car). Instead I relied on a mixture of "personali responsibility," "public options" and private resources — in other words, walking, relying on public transportation, or hopping in the occasional taxicab.

In other words, I "opted out" of car ownership. Likewise, I "opted out" of home ownership for many years, choosing to rent instead. (Thus, I did purchase renter's insurance, which is cheaper than home insurance.) I don't have to own a car, and I don't have to own a house.

But, I can't "opt out" of having Gastro Esophageal Reflux Disease, and which can come across as trivial ailment (as so many ailments do, initially) that's no more urgent than "indigestion." Untreated and undetected, however, it can cause esophageal cancer, in which case I couldn't "opt out" of cancer any more than my mom and my sister could "opt out" of breast cancer. In fact, I couldn't "opt out" of any other serious medical condition — like muscular distrophy, multiple sclerosis, tumors, a congenital heart condition, celiac disease, polycystic kidney disease — or any number of maladies that can affect the human body, because I can't "opt out" of having a human body the way I can opt out of owning a car or a home that also requires insurance.

I can't opt out of being a human being any more than my female friend can opt out of being a woman, as well. No one can. And given the number of things that can and do go wrong with the human body, the longer we're own one — as with a car or a house — the greater the risk that something is going to go wrong with it. That's especially true as these human bodies of ours age or are exposed to the every day risks of living. If it has faulty wiring or missing parts, just try trading it in for a newer model, or selling it and buying "new construction."

So when you come right down to it, as Ellen Goodman wrote, we all share a common pre-existing condition called "being human."

We can say a woman is not a pre-existing condition, but that's the status quo. And the truth is that as long as we keep it, then answer to the question "Are you a pre-existing condition?" is pretty clear: Yes. We all are, eventually.

Reclaiming "We"

Terrance Heath — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:36:29 -0700

Mike Elk couldn't have been more right in his thinking about what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have thought of the Teabaggers, Birthers, etc. He would have seen that those faces that at first glance seem twisted in anger are really twisted in pain. He would recognize those faces as well as the source of the fear and anger distorting them.

It's not about adopting their politics, compromising our own, or even tolerating their tactics. It's about reclaiming "We" — The same "We" that Dr. King and civil rights workers sang about, and that I remember singing about myself in church, on the occasions when we sang "We Shall Overcome."

Mike wrote:

As Martin Luther King explained in his sermon "The Strength To Love":

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

During the whole dialogue on the teabaggers, I never heard the narrative of why these poor people were turning up at the town halls. They were turning up because they were scared of change, because the only change they have known is their standard of living dramatically decreasing over the last 30 years. I never heard anyone talk about how most of the teabaggers are the people that need health care reform the most.

In fact, we got off message entirely. We stopped talking about health care reform altogether. We failed to articulate a progressive vision these people might adopt. We took an eye for an eye, leaving everyone blind.

Very few of us made any attempt to really reach out and embrace these teabaggers on the issues that we share with them. Many of their concerns about the bailout, NAFTA-style trade deals and the general loss of trust in government are core progressive issues. We could lock arms with the teabaggers and form a powerful alliance, but, instead, we attack our potential allies because we do not take the time to engage them.

Without a doubt, King understood that the civil rights movement and the efforts to end segregation were not just about African Americans. The brutality that segregation, lynching, Jim Crow, and slavery visited upon African Americans is well documented. But the man who said "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly," understood that systems of brutality are a two way street. He saw that the system of segregation brutalized the bodies, minds and spirits of both blacks and whites, and was therefore harmful to both.

As progressives, we are working to change — to heal, actually — the disastrous results of 30 years of conservative failure and its consequences for everything from our economy to infrastructure to health care. In doing so, we can't afford to ignore that these consequences have been particularly devastating for the very states which have come the strongest and most strident objections to health care reform, the stimulus and other progressive attempts to alleviate those consequences.

When it comes to health care reform, the states most likely to benefit — because they have the highest percentages of uninsured citizens — are the source of the loudest objections to reform.

Overall, about 15 percent of Americans are uninsured, according to the 2008 American Community Survey. But here is the state-by-state picture:

"Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia had uninsured rates that were lower than the national figure," an analysis written for the Census Bureau says. "All of the states in the Midwest and Northeast are included in this group. Nineteen states had uninsured rates higher than the national figure; 10 of these states were located in the South and the other nine were located in the West."

The state with the highest proportion of uninsured is Cornyn's Texas, where 24 percent of residents are without coverage. The other four states with uninsured rates of 20 percent or more are Alaska, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.

States with uninsured rates between 17 percent and 20 percent also are in the Deep South and the West. They include Montana (Baucus), Arizona (Kyl) and Idaho, represented on the Finance Committee by Republican Mike Crapo.

If you superimposed the Census Bureau's color-coded map of the states' percentages of uninsured residents, it would bear quite a resemblance to those election-night maps of red and blue America. Yet blue-state America, through its mostly Democratic representatives, seems willing-for fiscal, political or moral reasons-to extend its hand and open its wallet so that red-state Americans can get health insurance.

"It's not a nationally uniform problem," says Steve Zuckerman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on Medicaid. Because there has to be a greater improvement in coverage in the South and West, Zuckerman says, "there will be a geographic redistribution."

We know the numbers. We've read the reports, and used the statistics — with a dash or two of snark — to point out the paradox of people supporting policies against their own interests, and opposing policies that would improve their lot.

But the man who dreamed that "sons of slaves and sons of slaveowners" would someday sit down together dreamed it for both the sons of slaves and the sons of slaveowners — even if the latter rejected that dream as passionately as the former desired it. He wanted to free both, when he said "If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive."

If progressives hope to achieve health care for all, an economy that works for all, a safe and secure world for all, decent jobs, livable wages — or any of our other goals — we have to want all of this for the red-faced man yelling about immigrants on the National Mall, and the woman standing up in a townhall meeting, waving a birth certificate in a ziplock bag and shouting "I want my country back!"

Likewise, many of the same states are at the epicenter of job loss.

America's worsening job woes come with a southern drawl. States in America's South, such as Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, have flipped during the recession from putting up robust employment numbers envied by other regions to posting many of America's most painful rates.

Seven southern states now have double-digit unemployment rates, an unusual concentration in a country with a national rate in June of 9.5 percent. The list includes Florida, which two years earlier had one of the lowest jobless rates, at 4 percent.

"This recession has walloped the Sun Belt in ways that previous recessions have not," said economist James Diffley, managing director for regional services at IHS Global Insight in Philadelphia.

And a good bit of the blame employment numbers going south down south, a lot of it can be laid at the door of gobalization, and the advent of "off-shoring" that sounded the death knell for the southern textile industry and the jobs it provided.

For years, these mills had eluded obsolescence with an iron-hard work ethic and investments in technology that kept production costs competitive. No more. Just as the textile industry left New England for the South 80 years ago, it's now shipping off for Mexico, Honduras, even Pakistan, thanks to looser trade laws.

Thousands of middle-aged, minimally educated American textile workers have been left behind in a landscape of shuttered plants and cool smokestacks.

The lintheads, as they were once called, have few prospects.

"Dreams? Ambitions? Goals?" Blankenship asked, as if she were talking about foreign lands. "It's funny, but I've never thought about them. I always figured I'd be sewing."

It's the same old story, one that many American steel workers or toy makers could tell.

But the last decade has been especially harsh on the textile industry, with 441,000 jobs disappearing, a loss of 44 percent. Last year, 110 mills shut (most of them in the South), 68,000 workers were laid off and several of the largest companies filed for bankruptcy.

Even Pat Buchanan seems to understand this much.

Some of the same workers have probably gone to work in some of the auto plants that sprung up in the south, thanks to very generous subsidies for foreign automakers — $253 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and land improvement for Mercedes- Benz; $158 million in similar perks for Honda, plus another $90 million later; $577 million in breaks for Volkswagon; another $197 million for Nissan; etc. — voted in by the same lawmakers who fulminated against the Detroit bailout. It adds up to more than $3.8 billion, and not without painful cutbacks for some.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to determine whether the returns warrant the original incentives,” said Matthew N. Murray, executive director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for Business and Economic Research. “It’s just hard to show that it’s going to produce enough tax revenue.”

Others wonder if the incentive packages don’t go too far to divert taxpayer dollars from vital state services. When Tennessee courted Nissan in 2005, for example, its $197 million gift came about the same time the state was cutting 170,000 low-income adults from its Medicaid rolls. A 1998 Time magazine report found that an Alabama elementary school adjacent to the Mercedes plant was home to 540 kids in a building designed to hold 290.

“The Mercedes-Benz plant illustrates a fundamental principle of corporate welfare,” the article read. “Everyone else pays for economic incentives — either with higher taxes, fewer services or both.”

None of the results of these incentives have come close to replacing the jobs that were lost due to the same push for globalization that gave birth to these deals. The incentives, tax cuts and other deals to get BMW to build in South Carolina, for example, hasn't come close to replacing the 250,000 jobs lost there. The same lawmakers voted against thousands of their own constituents keeping their jobs, with U.S. auto manufacturers.

Clearly the allegiance of the 31 Republicans who opposed the loan to save GM and Chrysler is not with the United States of America, which would lose 900,000 jobs if just GM closed, and more than 2.1 million if the Big Three did. Those job losses would occur during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In November, the 11th consecutive month of job losses, another 533,000 people were thrown out of work, swelling the pool of unemployed to 10.3 million. The Toyota Republicans were willing to increase that.

They voted against the interests of their own states as well. Consider what would happen in a few of those Southern States whose senators led the charge against preserving the Big Three. If just GM collapsed, Kentucky would lose 20,000 jobs; Alabama, 21,000; Georgia, 23,000, and Tennessee, 29,400, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute.

Sen. Cochran just didn’t think it was right for the U.S. government to aid its auto industry. But apparently he’s fine with foreign governments providing subsidies to the transplant automakers in his state. And, apparently, he’s okay with spending state and federal money to help foreign automakers locate manufacturing plants in the U.S.

That conservatives have had so much success getting so many to vote against what progressives perceive to be their own self-interests (assuming that livable wages, job security, etc., are in their self-interest) is alternatly mystifying and exasperating to progressives, both of which become handy fodder for cathartic bursts of snark.

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Sure, it's tempting — and even gratifying — to respond with a healthy dose of snark when someone like Pat Buchanan writes that working class whites are "losing their country." But while his claims of Christianity being "purged from schools their taxes paid for, and "illegal aliens" crossing the border to get "free health care in the U.S. are risible, he actually has a point when writing about shuttered factories and jobs being sent overseas — though to get to it one has to wade through his blathering about affirmative action and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. to get "free health care." (One wonders what Buchanan thinks about the thousands of U.S. citizens going to Mexico in search of health care because they can't afford it back home.)

As Charles Lemos points out over at MyDD, Buchanan and others voted for the very policies that got us here, when they voted for Ronald Reagan and his policies.

The Christian faith purged charge is disingenuous because Pat knows that there is separation of Church and State in this country. What he is objecting to is the teaching of evolution, or the fact that we won't allow creationism disguised as science to be taught in public schools, and that apparently threatens their world. But most of Pat's complaints are economic in nature, though he does so effortlessly descend into a noxious xenophobia. He complains about "factories shuttered," "jobs outsourced," "bank bailouts," "unbalanced books" and "trillions to Fortune 500 companies."

Pity that Pat Buchanan doesn't realize that he voted for that agenda when he voted for Ronald Reagan. Because his litany of complaints, at least on the economic front, are all traceable to policies enacted by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.

But Pat's rant is actually quite a race card throwback to the 1970s. It was sinister then and it is sinister now. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson back in 2006 published a seminal work entitled Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. In it, Dr. Jacobson described how the then nascent conservative movement played on white fears through attacks on the social aspects of Great Society programs such as affirmative action. Pat plays that card and follows with the free healthcare and education for illegal aliens, the favorite term of the right for undocumented workers.

And funny how illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates are all generally higher in red state America than they are in blue state America. The states with the highest born out-of-wedlock are the District of Columbia (technically not a state), New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Drug use is a mix bag and harder to measure but Rhode Island (closely followed by Alaska and Arizona) has the highest percentage of regular illicit drug users and Iowa the lowest. The highest high school drop out rates are in Louisiana, Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, the lowest drop rates are in New Jersey, Connecticut, North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. The problems Pat complains about while national are deeper in the red states.

But progressives should avoid taking that approach too far, lest we make the same mistake Republicans have made for decades and continue to make — even at the risk of being limited to a southern regional party. The problems Buchanan cites are deeper in the red states, and so it the pain of those problems, and the conservative politics and policies Lemos cites don't alleviate the problems or the painful consequences visited upon the everyday people who grow increasingly angry about both.

Their leaders don't have answers. Faced with constituents dealing with economic hardship and worries about health care and their lack of insurance, they don't have answers; whether it's South Carolina governor Mark Sanford refusing stimulus funds while offering his prayers to a jobless South Carolinian, Sen. Tom Coburn telling a woman whose husband has traumatic brain injury to ask her neighbors for help, Sen. Chuck Grassley telling an underinsured man to get a government job if he wants coverage as good as Grassley's, Rep. Phil Gingrey laughing off 14,000 Americans losing their health care every day because they lost their jobs, or Rep. Eric Cantor telling a woman whose relative has two tumors and no health care to find a government program or get some charity.

Conservatives are doing to their own constituents what they've done for decades where minorities are concerned. And just as their treatment of minorities has resulted in a noticeably more homogenous party, it will end up making the GOP and conservatives less and less relevant in the process of finding solutions to the problems and challenges Americans are facing now and will face in the future. They will become less and less relevant so long as they fail to address people's needs, and fail to see that they're not addressing people's needs.

Too often, predominantly white organizations — as the Republican party seems to have become, and seems determined to be — ponder their lack of diversity, only to end up asking the wrong questions.

It's the same basic rhetoric I've heard in just about every discussion I've been involved in over why there aren't more black republicans. My point has always been that Republicans - like other predominantly white organizations - spend more time asking why more black people aren't joining them than they do asking themselves why they aren't attracting more black supporters.

In other words, the avoid the reality that the reason they don't attract more black supporters is because they don't address - and aren't seen as addressing - the needs and concerns of many in black communities. The analysis never gets further than that because it would probably undermine their current base of power. So every discussion I've had ends up with the other side's argument boiling down to this: the reason more blacks don't support the Republican party is because they don't know what's good for them.

That's the nice way of putting it. The more blunt way of putting it would be much closer to the way the conservative blogger above put it. Because they are dumb. The blacks who don't vote Republican are dumb. The anti-Bush supporters in Latin America - or anyone else in Latin America who doesn't support the U.S. Agenda - is dumb. The folks marching against Bush and the U.S. agenda in Latin America just don't know what's good for them.

It's a tactic that becomes a message that ultimately insults and alienates the people they claim to want to win over. The more constructive question to ask would be "How can we address the concerns of (fill in the blank with just about any demographic group) more effectively?" It's also the harder question to ask and answer, because it means you also have to want to address their concerns and accept their concerns as just as valid and important as your own.

In other words, you won't really bring anyone into your coalition or movement, because you've already told them it isn't for them. Jobs, health care reform, etc. — all the things that are partially fueling their fear and anger, and your plans to solve them — are not for them.

Meanwhile, people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are ready to tell them whose fault it is.

It’s Rush’s America, and the right wing media that keeps them Afraid about “blacks taking over” and “foreign nationals” changing the “White, male, Christian power structure,” so they won’t trace their fear to economy and how well conservative economic policies have served them.

There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.

Obama can’t do much about those who are against him because of his race. Even a 1 percent unemployment rate wouldn’t change the minds most scarred by prejudice. But there is a second level of angry opposition to which Obama needs to pay more attention. It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession and who are now hurting even more.

…In fact, many who now feel rage have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit. September’s unemployment numbers told the story in broad terms: Among men 20 and over, unemployment was 10.3 percent; among women, the rate was 7.8 percent.

Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by globalization and technological transformation. Even before the recession, the decline in the number of well-paid jobs in manufacturing hit the incomes of this group of Americans hard. The trouble in the construction industry since the downturn began has compounded the problem.

Progressives need to figure out how to address those fears and concerns, and then reach out to whatever portion of Limbaugh’s audience may be reachable.

Let me define "reachable." We're not talking "reachable" in the sense that they can be swayed by arguments. I mean reachable through economic and political changes that ultimately relieve their anxiety and improve their lives. In other words, they can best be reached by progressive success on issues like health care reform, jobs, and the economy — because health care for all, and an economy that works for all means them too.

But, again, wanting those things for all means wanting it for them too — for the man standing on the national mall waving a copy of the U.S.S. Constitution, and the woman with her birth certificate in a ziplock bag; and to want it for them sincerely, not begrudgingly, but out of understanding that their anger — misdirected though it may be — stems at least in part from very real pain, suffering and need that their leaders have failed to acknowledge or act to relieve.

Those shouts and cries of "I want my country back" that echoed through town halls this summer, come from a visceral and and very real sense of loss. As E.J. Dionne notes above, the anger that has been on display lately certainly has some basis in racism that runs too deep and reaches too far for any one president — even Obama — to address. Indeed, some of that sense of loss stems from demographic realities — the "end of white America" and the "browning of America," recently manifested in the the growing number counties in which whites are the minority —of which people like president Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor are inevitable symbols.

But Dionne also notes, as I've tried to describe above, that some of that anger is rooted rooted in the real loss of an America where these same people had a reasonable shot at finding work that earned them a decent wage, enabling them to improve their lot, take care of their families, and educate their children. In exchange, many Americans were sold a bill of goods by a smiling, seemingly friendly salesman who told them they had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

It sounded like the old American promise, but even better. What they got was something quite different.

Now for the truly shocking. I was reading Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference by Alberto Alesina and Edward Ludwig Glaeser. In terms of social mobility, being born in the bottom half in the United States is a life sentence of poverty. You stand a better statistical chance of becoming wealthy if you are born poor in Italy than you do in the United States.

Now consider rates of entrepreneurship. A 2005 survey showed that 28 percent of Americans would like to own their businesses. That compares to just 15 percent of Europeans. Yet Americans, it seems, are deferring their dreams while Europeans are living theirs. 14.7 percent of Europeans are self-employed while just 7.3 percent of Americans are self-employed. What's more, the rate in the United States is actually declining. In 1994, 9.1 percent of Americans were self-employed.

This is to me all quite startling and befuddling because Ronald Reagan, who remains an adored figure by American conservatives, won the Presidency in part by claiming that the GOP was the party that wants to see an America in which people can still get rich. But the facts demonstrate quite the opposite. Reagan's policies were nothing more than a redistribution of wealth upwards away from the middle class. By allowing the minimum wage to fall below the poverty line, he single-handedly created the working poor. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line in 1979 was 11.7 percent. It is now 13.2 percent. And yet there is a guy in the NY-23 running for Congress by name of Doug Hoffman on the Conservative Party ticket who is proudly going around calling himself a "Reagan Conservative." How is the failure of the last 28 years not more evident?

Progressives have to begin by understanding that the anger on the right has at least one cause that we're equipped to address, by organizing to elect progressive leaders and enacting progressive policies aimed at addressing the economic pain, jobs, health disparities, and other problems gripping the whole country — but squeezing some regions more tightly than others.

Understanding, though, is different from pity — something Dr. King clearly understood when he said, “Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.”

Robert Fuller, author of All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity and the founder of a dignitarian movement Dr. King would almost certainly have seen as an extension of the civil rights movement, expands upon the difference between pity and true concern.

Though its cause appears to lie outside ourselves, hate has a secret accomplice within. Its name is Fear. "Hate is the consequence of fear," Cyril Connolly notes. "We fear something before we hate it."

Anger congeals to hate when people fear domination and experience the indignity of being discounted. No one, conservative or progressive, likes being taken for a nobody. Hatred takes root when fears remain unaddressed and dignity is disregarded. Imagined indignities can feel as injurious as real ones, and suffice to incite people to commit mayhem and murder.

What's needed to initiate the winding down of enmity is for at least one party to the recriminations to stop returning indignity in kind and start allaying the fears of its opposite number. This means talking over the heads of media demagogues straight to those whose fears have left them vulnerable to hate-mongers. The epigram notwithstanding, it does not put one side at a disadvantage to "go first" in extending the olive branch. Then, it must be willing to meet indignity with dignity, for however long it takes, while not subtly compromising the process by taking pride in its own forbearance. Maintaining civility doesn't mean giving in to others' demands, but it does mean dealing with them respectfully.

With even a modest diminution of fear, we re-conceive our enemiesas adversaries. With a hint of mutual value, adversaries become rivals--a term acknowledging each party's role as a teacher of the other. Finally, by recognizing their mutual dependency, rivals begin to see themselves as partners. By this time, comity has replaced enmity, and incivility is out of fashion.

Conservative politicians and right-wing media have done an impressive job of making sure that the failure of the last 28 years is, if not less evident, at least blamed on culprits who are easy to blame, but far from responsible for electing the politicians and supporting the policies that resulted in todays crises and disparities. Progressives, depending on our response, can seal the deal on the right-wing's campaign to deceive their constituents and deflect their anger.

In an essay from October 2000, Fuller wrote:

To "nobody" individuals, or a people, is not only to do them an injustice, it is to plant a time bomb in our own midst.

The consequences range from school shootings to revanchism, even genocide. The 20th century has seen many demagogues who have promised to restore the pride and dignity of a people that felt "nobodied." Hitler enjoyed the support of Germans humiliated by punitive measures in the aftermath of World War I. President Milosevic of Yugoslavia has traded on the wounded pride of the Serbs. People will become apologists for crimes they would otherwise condemn to get even with those they believe have nobodied them.

The people that Elk, Dionne, and others including myself have been writing about, in states hardest it by joblessness, lack of access to health care, and economic disparity have already been "nobodied" — perceived and treated as "less than nothing," having little value or significance — by 30 years of conservatism and the economy it's created and seeks to sustain. They shouldn't be "nobodied" by progressives; not just because it's the wrong thing to to, but because it runs counter to progressive vision and goals.

Back in 1989, I picked up an copy of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. I grew up in a home where books about the history of the civil rights movement took up several shelves, and I read as many of them as I could. So the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Scwherner in Neshoba County Mississippi (where Ronald Reagan is said to have launched his White House bid in 1980) wasn't new to me, but one detail of the story stood out to me: Schwerner's ability and willingnes even at the moment of death to see past the anger the man who was about to kill him, to see their shared humanity.

Another story, a year and a month later, June 21, 1964. It was the first night of Freedom Summer in Mississippi. College students from all over the United States, who had been training in nonviolence, went to Mississippi, where black people were not permitted to vote. That night, three of them were kidnapped by the Klan--Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. A bunch of Klansmen took them on the side of the road and were preparing to kill them. A Klansman pulled out a gun and put a pistol to Schwerner's chest and said, "Are you the nigger-lovin' Jew?" And Schwerner said, "Sir, I know just how you feel." And those were his last words before the Klansman shot him.

The Klansmen couldn't forget those words. Almost a month later, two of them in widely separate incidents confessed to FBI agents the events of that night, and both of them said those were Schwerner's last words, and both times the agent said, "Are you sure? That's a very unlikely thing for somebody to say." And they both said, "Yes, I'll never forget that."

It had an enormous effect on the agents. And they asked people in the movement: Is this something that someone would say? And, of course, the people in the movement said, Yes, that's what nonviolent training is about. One is the discipline not to resist, not to strike back, and the other--"Sir, I know just how you feel"-- is the discipline to try to make a human connection with somebody, even the person that's about to kill you.

The heart of nonviolence is to discipline yourself and have faith in the other guy. Mickey Schwerner epitomized it. This was an evanescent moment because nonviolence began to dissolve even within the movement, but that's another story.

What progressives must do — not yet at gunpoint, though firearms have been appearing a townhall meetings and right-wing protests — is what Schwener exemplified: reclaim the "we" that King and civil rights workers embraced and sang about, the "we" in "We Shall Overcome." We must have the same audacity to doggedly include in that "we" the teabaggers, the birthers, and all the rest.

It's what progressivism has always been about: expanding "we" to ultimately include us all.