OurFuture.org Blogs: Sara Robinson

Postcard from Canada: Why I Missed Obama's Speech

Sara Robinson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:08:50 -0700

True confessions: I missed the health care speech. While the whole lefty blogosphere was watching and blogging and tweeting, I was sacked out in my attic bedroom high on a mountainside in Vancouver, sleeping off a narcotic haze and the exhausting aftermath of a long night spent in the emergency room at Lions Gate Hospital.

President Obama tried to remind Americans all over again why health care reform matters. I didn't need a speech: I'd just had an up-close-and-personal encounter with a rational, not-for-profit, single-payer health care system. And it reminded me all over again (as it does every time we see a doctor here) why health care reform is the most crucial battle of our generation.

The health event was new to me, but pretty garden-variety as ER visits go. I had my first gallbladder attack. Not life-threatening, just the worst pain I can remember being in since the last time I was in labor. It started up just before dinner Tuesday night. At 2 am Wednesday, still awake and in worsening pain, I found my keys and shoes, stumbled down to the car (leaving the rest of the family sleeping), and drove the 25 blocks down to the hospital.

Four things in particular stood out about the hours that followed -- things that show just how different medicine is when the patients trump profit as the main priority, things that Americans need to understand if they're going to see through the chaos of this moment to the kind of future that's possible.

First, the waiting time between walking in the door and being admitted was literally about 45 seconds. American conservatives have filled people's heads with images of Canadians packed into old, worn-out, badly-lit, overcrowded emergency rooms bustling and echoing with writhing, moaning souls enduring waits that can stretch to days. Sorry to blow the fantasy, but last night, I walked into a newly-remodeled, gently-lit, serenely quiet lobby that I had completely to myself. There wasn't another human being in sight. Even the receptionist had apparently taken a break.

I doubled over on the counter, breathing through the pain (those long-ago Bradley childbirth classes are still paying off). Moments later, a nurse appeared to check me in. With a quick swipe of my BC provincial care card, my complete medical files glimmered onto his computer screen. He put a thermometer in my mouth, then confirmed the basic data while a printer spit out my wristband. The whole check-in process took under three minutes.

"It's really quiet tonight," I noticed, trying to look nonchalant while clutching my stomach.

"Actually, we're pretty full." This was my first visit since a recent remodel created a huge new ER ward. (They're expecting the world here: this particular hospital is the closest one to the skiing venues for next February's Winter Olympics, and also one of the province's major orthopedic centers. It's where Canada's athletes come to get put back together.) There were lots of people here -- but they were all already comfortably checked in and settled away in beds, rather than milling around the lobby waiting to be tended. In another three minutes, I was settled in, too.

Second: You don't realize how much politics -- in this case, the war on drugs -- has warped medical care until you see how differently non-American doctors and nurses deal with pain management. Since Canada sees drug abuse as a social problem, not a law enforcement one, it's stubbornly resisted several ham-handed attempts by the American government to get it to crack down on doctors who persist in seeing codeine and morphine as useful medications. While Health Canada does keeps tabs on individual doctors' prescribing habits, docs are given vastly more discretion in managing their patients' pain than their US counterparts are. If you're hurting, the docs here will calmly and generously prescribe painkillers -- good ones, serious ones, the yummy kind that really do the job. (And yeah, I guess that would explain why the whole ER ward was so eerily quiet, too.)

So it was that, minutes after my arrival, the ward nurse tucked me in and hooked me up to an IV drip with saline and anti-nausea medications. "Would you like some morphine with that?" she asked, in the same casual and pleasant voice with which a waiter might offer you cream for your coffee. My inside voice, battered after a long evening of agony, jumped up and hollered: "YESSS! Oh, HELL yes!" My outside voice sweetly smiled back: "That would be lovely." In moments, eight hours long hours of accelerating pain finally subsided -- and I went to sleep, waking only occasionally from my opiate bliss to find myself being wheeled out for this test or that as night turned to morning.

Third: About those electronic medical records. I am a fan. A big one. Everybody in the BC health care system has their records in one big database, accessible within seconds in every doctor's office and hospital in the province. The doctors and nurses never have to waste a lot of time taking history, or guessing at the doses of the meds I'm taking (it turns out that dutifully reporting that "I think I'm taking half of that round green pill now" is surprisingly unhelpful) or wondering where those X-rays disappeared to, or cross-testing my blood type. It's all there -- including digital copies of all the X-rays, ultrasounds, mammograms, and EKGs I've ever had here. Every doctor that writes a prescription knows exactly what else I've been prescribed. It's hard to overstate how much this improves the level of care, even as it cuts costs.

(It's also another reason doctors can be so generous with painkillers. Since all the information from everywhere ends up in the same file, the e-records system automatically notices and flags doctor-shoppers and drug-seekers -- which, in turn, allows doctors to be much more confident about giving non-addicts what they need without being worried that they're enabling somebody they shouldn't be.)

Beyond the vast improvements in individual care, though, there are also huge public health benefits. Qualified public health researchers can get access to the population-level data in the files -- though they need special authorization (and a damned good reason) to access individual patients' names. They use this data to compare the pool of patients who've had treatment A against those who got treatment B; and issue impartial advisories as to which is better. They can instantly track emergent epidemics like SARS, or notice geographic anomalies affecting one area or another, or figure out who got a batch of bad vaccine. As genetics-based medicine emerges (and BC is one of the world centers for this), the growing pile of data in this system will eventually become a global asset in the effort to correlate the various genetic and environmental interactions that contribute to illness or health.

Do I worry about privacy? Not in Canada, much. This is a country that has a national Office of Privacy. The privacy laws are strict enough that the prairie provinces are doing a booming business in storing records for assorted American enterprises, where they're beyond the long snooping noses of Homeland Security and other public and private buttinskis. In theory, only authorized medical personnel get access to my records. Both provincial and national laws (and the general mood of the country) support the idea that we've got privacy rights that deserve careful respect.

At the same time, I'm not at all sure Americans are ready for this. Canada's system works because the country has a strong culture of privacy, and an even stronger bulwark of laws that back that up. Americans have almost no data privacy to speak of compared to most of the rest of the industrialized world, and no real expectation of having any. Frankly, I wouldn't trust any American e-records system until our whole cultural and legal framework around data privacy is overhauled. I trust the Canadian government to get it mostly right. I don't trust any American government not to sell my data to ChoicePoint or hand it over to the NSA. Until that changes, y'all be careful.

Finally, the last thing I noticed about last night was something that wasn't there. I'm talking about that little meter in the back of my head, the one that whirred and spun and ticked off every charge from the minute I walked into an American ER until the minute I walked out again. The IV. The X-rays. The box of Kleenex, the Tylenol, and the barf pan. The crappy food (if you're lucky enough to get any). Even with good insurance, the co-pays alone on eight hours in the ER could bust the family grocery budget for the next three months. That big number hanging over my head was always a real distraction from dealing with whatever crisis actually put one of us there. No matter what the presenting condition was when we arrived, I always seemed to have a bad case of heartburn when we left.

Contrast that with last night, when my glorious morphine dreams were completely untroubled by the sound of that mental meter. By the time they checked me out at 10:30 am, I'd had a whole bank of diagnostic tests, including a long and detailed ultrasound exam that found twin bouncing baby gallstones. The ER then handed me off to an internist for further exploration of the issue. (I see her next week -- it's already set up.)

No bills. No worrying about how to pay for the surgery, either -- that will be covered, too. The morning nurse (the fabulous and charming Trish) pulled the IV. I got dressed, picked up my purse, and left. And that was it. No pain. No worries. No heartburn.

And that's all it should ever be. And could be. And will be, if we keep leaning on Congress to get this thing done right.

Fox Says Losing Advertisers Doesn't Hurt. Don't You Believe It.

Sara Robinson — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:42:37 -0700

As of today, Glenn Beck has lost 62 advertisers and counting due to Color of Change's campaign. And FOX is still asserting that this doesn't really hurt the network as a whole, because the advertisers are simply re-directing their ad buys to other shows.

A lot of progressives have taken this dismissal at face value -- but they shouldn't. It's a fib, and anyone who's run a retail operation knows it. The key problem with FOX's blithe assertion is that it seems to suggest that there's an infinite amount of airtime to be had. If we can't sell this time, we'll just make it up by selling other time.

The question that's being begged here is: What other time? In the real world, advertising time is a very limited resource -- which is precisely why it's so valuable, and why TV stations can charge so much for it. There are only 24 hours in a day; and only about 18 minutes of each hour can be sold to advertisers. Not even Rupert Murdoch can change those terms. Those 432 minutes per station per day are all he gets, ever. To stay profitable, FOX needs to squeeze the most revenue possible out of every last one of those minutes. It can't afford to donate any of them to charity on a long-term basis, which is effectively what's happening in Beck's case.

Most Fox News Channel stations run Beck's show at least a couple of times per day, usually during prime hours when they can charge top rates for the time. That means that the Color of Change campaign is depriving FOX of its ability to sell two out of every 24 hours, in every market -- and some of its most lucrative hours, at that.

To get a sense of this, imagine having a real-life store, and suddenly losing 8.5% of your total square footage and inventory. Worse: it's coming out of your very best display space and top-of-the-line merchandise. And to add insult to injury, you're still having to carry all the same overhead costs you did before. In a lot of industries, losing that much of your margin is a death sentence. Media runs at higher margins, but it still cuts to the bone.

Those diverted advertisers are left to pick over whatever's still available in the remaining 22 hours. And that ain't much. Where are they going to go? O'Reilly and Hannity are already well-supported by top-rate advertisers, and there's no more time to be sold there. And I'm sorry, but advertising on the 2 a.m. re-run of Greta Van Susteren's show just doesn't have the same bang for the buck.

Any way you cut it, FOX is losing almost all the revenue it should be making off Beck's prime time slots. Even if the advertisers move to other shows, it won't help them recover what the network as a whole is losing as a result of this campaign. They're trying to put a happy face on it and say it doesn't matter -- but behind the scenes, they're scrambling to pull together enough wingnut welfare to keep Beck afloat until this all blows over.

FOX needs that cash. It's not getting it. Don't let them tell you it's not hitting them where it hurts.

Is Glenn Beck's Show on Right-Wing Life Support?

Sara Robinson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:07:19 -0700

There's emerging evidence to suggest that, as the legitimate advertisers disappear, Glenn Beck's TV show may be relying more and more on financial life support from rich right-wingers -- with plenty of extra help from us taxpayers -- to stay on the air.

Media Matters is keeping daily track of the show's remaining advertisers. For Tuesday, September 8, the list looked like this:

Rosland Capital
Hydrolyze
The Foundation for a Better Life
Carbonite
Citrix (GoToMeeting)
Topdot Mortgage
News Corp. (The Wall Street Journal)
Lear Capital
Clarity Media Group (The Weekly Standard)
National Geographic Society (National Geographic Channel)
IRSTaxAgreements.com
Independent Women Forum
Zero Technologies (ZeroWater)
Loan modification help line 1-888-336-5967

At this late date, with upwards of 60 advertisers gone (almost all of them for-profit corporations), it's safe to assume that these remaining holdouts are there as a matter of principle, and will be funding Beck as long he stays on the air. (One likes to imagine that the National Geographic Society was so preoccupied with taking pictures that it sort of accidentally wandered onto the list; and will immediately march right back off it once it stops to change lenses, looks around, and suddenly realizes where it is.) Progressives might get some traction leaning on Carbonite (which sells online computer backups) and ZeroWater; but for the most part, Color of Change has now emptied the barrel. There's not much left to do at this stage but watch and make sure nobody tries to sneak back in.

What's interesting now, though, is who's moving into all that empty space. Rupert Murdoch, who owns FOX, also owns The Wall Street Journal. From his perspective, using the unsalable time on Beck's show to promote another of his properties is good synergy -- but it's also a way of tapping the WSJ's ad budget to prop up Beck until (he hopes) this blows over. Murdoch's stubborn, but he's not known for patience -- and odds are good he won't be willing to do that indefinitely.

Even more interesting is the appearance of the Foundation for a Better Life and the Independent Women's Forum. According to Sourcewatch, the Foundation for A Better Life is a 501(c)3 funded by far-right-wing oil and media baron Philip Anschutz. The Independent Women's Forum is a conservative anti-feminist group that opposes affirmative action, gender equity programs like Title IX, and the Violence Against Women Act; and which has close ties to Americans for Prosperity. Both are non-profit 501(c)3 corporations. In addition, last week's roster included the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is one of the leading organizations backing the teabagger movement.

What are these people doing here? It's quite possible they're hanging around to provide Beck with big infusions of free money, helping him out until things return to "normal" (as if anything in Beck's wobbly, deranged orb could ever be described as normal). Non-profit 501(c)3s (full disclosure: The Institute for America's Future is also one) are interesting because they can be used as pass-throughs. Rich conservatives who want to funnel money to Beck can make a tax-free donation to FBL or IWF; and then those organizations use the taxpayer-subsidized funds to buy the ads, which they mark down as regular operating expenses. PACs don't give tax breaks, but they can also act as pass-throughs.

It's not clear how long these specific groups have been advertising on Beck's show, or how much of the show's current airtime they're collectively covering. But if ads from other Murdoch enterprises, conservative 501(c)3s, and PACs continue to grow as a share of the total, it will be clear a sign that Beck has fallen from his perch as the crown prince of FOX, and is well on is way to becoming a charity case who can only stay on the air as long as the big infusions of wingnut welfare continue.

And they can't keep it up for long. The donors on the right are being hit hard by the downturn, too; and keeping a national TV show up and running can very quickly hoover up a lot of money that could be going to support other conservative causes. It may be another few months before they come to terms with the inevitable and pull the feeding tube -- but the more of these kinds of advertisers we see on Beck's show, the closer we are to the reckoning.

-------------------------

Update: Just got a tweet from 1sky: FOX owns a majority share in the National Geographic Channel, and is probably giving them advertising time on a basis similar to the Wall Street Journal. So they're not leaving, either.

Conservative Derangement Syndrome: What Are They Thinking?

Sara Robinson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:06:02 -0700

Over on the right wing, the conservatives are all a-Twitter because someone dug up a YouTube video from last February in which White House environmental staffer Van Jones calls Republicans "assholes." And then yesterday, Glenn Beck breathlessly revealed that back in 2004, Jones signed a petition calling for further inquiry into 9/11.

Let's not let ourselves get distracted by this, people. First off: the conservatives lost their right to get upset about public profanity the day Dick Cheney threw the F-bomb at Pat Leahy on the floor of the Senate. Even George W. Bush got caught on tape calling a New York Times reporter "a major league asshole." Thanks to their own legendary potty-mouths, there's not a shred of moral high ground left for the GOP to stand on here. Jones' apology is a hell of a lot more than Leahy got from Cheney -- so it should be more than enough here.

Same deal with the video. Any party that's got its top leaders running around selling the idea of non-existent health care "death panels" and telling us that Obama is the next Jim Jones (that's the new meme next week, by the way -- look for it) long ago since forfeited its right to call anybody out on conspiracy theories. Their credibility on the subject is even flimisier than their forgery of Obama's Kenyan birth certificate. So, y'no, STFU.

The real story here, as Karl Frisch of Media Matters lays out quite elegantly, is that Glenn Beck is about to lose his TV show:

The story goes something like this: Van Jones helped found ColorOfChange.org which, "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," particularly online. Fox News’ Glenn Beck said President Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people" before going on to say that "this guy is, I believe, a racist."

ColorOfChange.org kicks off a campaign calling on advertisers to drop their sponsorship of Beck's show. To date, at least 57 companies have ceased advertising on Beck's Fox News program. Beck refuses to apologize and goes after Jones calling him, among other things, one of the President's "radical advisors" who is "fighting a revolution."

In vintage Beck, the Fox News conspiracy-theorist-in-chief bizarrely asked: "Will progressive pigs fly right out of Van Jones' butt and pedal bicycles to" replace coal power? Heck, even CNN's Howard Kurtz noted that Beck had "trashed" Jones while "neglect[ing] to mention" that Jones had co-founded the group which is currently leading the boycott of his Fox News show. 

For those of us who carry around spotting scopes and field guides to study the right wing, it's fascinating to watch Beck head into the final turn of what appears to be his death spiral. He may be going down -- but it's clear that he's decided it won't be a total loss if he can at least take Jones -- perhaps the most inspirational black leader in America after the President, and the most effective environmental leader, period -- right down with him. They lesson the right wing wants us to take away from this is for every one of theirs we take out, we'll lose one of our own. It's gang-war eye-for-an-eye logic -- and it's more evidence that what the conservatives are playing now isn't anything remotely like politics, but increasingly looks like full-out war.

Where is this violent, irrational fury coming from? Why can't the right wing simply accede gracefully to the idea that their time is over (for now, and maybe for good if they keep this up long enough to alienate the younger generations -- they're well on their way), and drop back and become the loyal opposition, as political parties here and around the world have always done? It's hard for liberals to fathom this. We tend to see accountability moments and power shifts as times of lessons learned, career chapters closed, and justice restored. It's painful, but the world goes on. But right-wingers experience accountability and power loss very, very differently -- in a way that creates profound derangement and terror whenever they're faced with even the mere threat of it.

Let me explain.

It's not news to anyone that the conservative movement has an authoritarian streak a mile wide and twice as deep. The desperate drive to quiet one's existential fears by acquiring ultimate control and unaccountable power -- rules for thee, but not for me -- is at the heart of conservative political theory, economics, and culture. And when their control cracks and their power ebbs away, it creates a panicked sense of loss that's bubbling up now in a whole range of strange and wondrous right-wing freakouts, from the teabaggers to the moonbat conspiracy theorists to Glenn Beck's bizarre deconstructions of UN statuary. (Apparently, not even one of the devout Christians at FOX recalled that the whole "swords into plowshares" idea -- the motif of a UN sculpture which Beck darkly called out the other night as a "Communist" image straight out of the USSR -- actually comes straight out of the Bible. And it appears there not just once, but three times -- in Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. Sunday School FAIL.)

The core problem is that authoritarian logic defines "liberty" in the context of a natural, God-given hierarchy. Freedom is -- by definition -- a direct function of social status. The higher your status, the more liberty you have to force lesser beings to do your will -- including the power to punish them for crossing you, and freedom from the fear that they can or will get back at you in return. (Whenever you hear conservatives talking about "freedom" and "liberty," remember this definition -- it's the codebreaker that allows you to hear the subtext of what they're really saying to each other.) This kind of "freedom" is, in the end, the only kind of liberty that really matters. Since any loss of status automatically dooms them to live under someone else's thumb, authoritarians will resist giving up power or control (which they see as their "rights") by any means necessary. Live free or die.

This explains a lot. First of all, it makes it easy to see why conservatism is constitutionally incapable of letting go of status markers like race, religion, wealth, and gender. These factors are the strongest determinants of where people sit in the hierarchy, and therefore how much freedom they're entitled to and who else they get to push around. In the conservative view (no matter how much they try to sidestep it or pretty it up), the Constitution was written to preserve the "liberties" of straight white Christian men of means. They, in turn, exercise their freedom by constraining the liberty of everyone else (even if they have to resort to bullying and violence to keep the underlings in their places. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do). Messing with that order, as progressives have always sought to do, is tantamount to killing America as they understand it. We want justice. They see it as treason.

This view of freedom also explains why conservatives overreact so bizarrely to any perceived loss of control. To the authoritarian right, having Democrats in charge is directly synonymous with losing the only "liberty" that matters. Any restriction on their accustomed power feels like punishment -- and they react particularly badly to it, because in their view punishment, by its very definition, is only for the Little People. Allowing someone else to hold you to account is the ultimate proof that you've lost your most precious asset -- control -- and are now someone else's bitch. Naturally, this is about the most traumatic thing that can happen to an authoritarian leader. They've lost the status that defines their freedom, along with the power that keeps their deepest fears at bay.

And just to make things even crazier, there's that unquestioned assumption that showing mercy is a sign of weakness. Authoritarians are quite willing to dehumanize and abuse outsiders when they're in control. So when they're knocked out of power, they just assume their enemies will do exactly the same, if not worse. (They'll also deride us as weaklings when we fail to meet that expectation -- there's no winning this one.) This bone-deep terror that we're going to do to them, at minimum, what they'd do to us adds extra urgency to their panic. This deep fear is what's being pegged by all those weird accusations about granny killing and death panels -- accusations that say a whole lot more about their own intentions and fantasies than they do about us.

Finally, there's the apocalypticism -- the final pit into which Beck is now descending. Color of Change (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not) dove right into this whole noxious slime pit when it dared to hold Glenn Beck accountable. (And to make it worse, they're doing it by leveraging the very same free market that FOX so deeply reveres. Oh, the irony.) To Jamie Rucker -- the real organizer of CoC's appeal to the better angels of Beck's advertisers -- and the rest of us on the left, holding Beck accountable for his words is a matter of simple justice. To Beck, though, we're violating his sacred deal with God and upending the entire order of his universe. The Lord gave him his TV show. Only the Devil himself can take it away. And right now, that devil looks a whole lot like Van Jones. It's the End of The World As He Knows It -- which, if you've got an ego the size of Beck's, means it must be the end of the world for everybody else, too.

You can hear it in almost every broadcast now: Beck sees himself as the lone warrior in a great cosmic battle, single-handedly holding the line between God's divine order and the evil hordes (led by Jones, Rucker, and Color of Change) out to sweep it all away. It feels like annihilation. It feels like a fight to the death. And if he, as God's own handpicked spokesperson, is going down, then he has a sacred obligation to take down the Devil's own with him.

In the process, he's also setting an example for how the righteous who come after him will fight on after he's gone. The right-wing freak show will be with us for as long as the Democrats are in power. We'll make better sense of it if we bear in mind that behind every new act is the same swirling haze of incendiary, mind-altering paranoia and projection -- a phantasm of phlogiston and fear that's the energy source keeping the whole circus lit and running. It may be completely unreal (or surreal); but underneath it all, there's a deranged logic at work that we need to understand if we're going to effectively defend our own.

But we know this for sure: If Beck succeeds in damaging Jones and Color of Change -- a decision that's largely in the hands President Obama -- you can count on this being the start of a fast and furious conservative witch hunt aimed at picking off every other progressive leader. What they'll learn is that this kind of minor smear is all it takes to turn liberals against each other -- and we'll effectively be in the position of letting the craziest people on the right wing decide for us who our leaders will be.

The lunatics are already running the GOP's asylum. We'll be even crazier than they are -- and lose any chance we have of returning the country to sanity -- if we let them tell us how to run ours as well. There's no need for any angst or debate: Let's just get Glenn Beck off the air, and let Van Jones get back to work saving the planet.

Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul

Sara Robinson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:00:59 -0700

August, die she must. The town hall freak show is winding down, the media circus is packing the cameras and satellite dishes and hairspray back into the vans, and Congress is soon heading back to the relative safety of DC. Yet, after all the fuss and bother, they're probably no more or less resolved to pass health care reform than they were back in June, when those first delirious fevers rose like clouds of infectious mosquito nymphs hatched from a thick, overheated carpet of soggy astroturf.

Let's hope they succeed at getting it done. But, win or lose, we're crazy to think that the goon squads formed and trained to instigate this summer's health care wars will pack it in just because the silly season is over. Those folks have tasted power, graduated from their introductory courses in Political Bullying 101, shared some camraderie and beer, and felt the heft of their own political muscle. That was fun. Now, what do we do next? Paralyze the school board over evolution in the textbooks? Intimidate the city council into shutting down the immigrants' services center -- or beat up some immigrants, so they'll just stop using it? Vandalize the cars and houses of known liberals? Get one of our own elected sheriff, so he can deputize the rest of us and make our posse official?

Nothin' but good times ahead. Now that they're organized up and had a little practice, the possibilities for further mayhem are limited only by the boundless paranoia and unfettered fantasies of the right-wing mind. Out at our local county fair this past weekend, the GOP booth was festooned with a wide array of buttons, tees, and bumper stickers proclaiming the owner's status as a "Proud Member of the Right-Wing Mob," and other similarly, um, assertively empowered sentiments. Judging from the general belligerence of the collection on offer, that seems to be the GOP's whole political identity now. They're determined to move boldly into 2010 as the party of America's union-, immigrant-, democracy-, and (if necessary) head-busting squadristi -- and they're damn proud of it all, you betcha.

* * *

How in the hell did we get here? And more to the point: how do we get back out?

The first question is depressingly easy. This is precisely where 40 years wandering in the right-wing moral, cultural, and economic wilderness has left us -- and, in fact, where it was always intended to lead us. A liberal democratic society is a complex system that's designed to be very resilient and self-correcting in the face of all kinds of extremism. But the health of that system -- especially its natural immunity to would-be attackers -- ultimately depends on just one factor. It cannot survive without people's ongoing confidence in a functioning political contract.

When it's working right, this contract guarantees the upper classes predictable, reliable wealth in return for their investments. It promises the middle class mobility, comfort, and security. It ensures the working classes fair reward for fair work, chances to move ahead, and protection against very real risk that they'll be forced into poverty if they can't work any more. Generally, as long as everybody gets their piece of this constantly re-negotiated deal, everybody stays invested in keeping the system going -- and a democratic society will remain upright, healthy, and moving mostly forward.

For the past four decades, conservatives have done everything in their power to dismantle that essential contract, and thus destroy our mutual confidence in the fundamental agreements that allow any democratic system to function. (None dare call it treason -- but a solid case could be made.) This isn't news: by now, most of us can recite the litany, chapter and verse, of the all the many ways they hacked away at America's essential ability to function as the Constitution intended.

But the biggest loser, as always, has been the working class -- the people whose only real power lies in their sweat and their numbers. Their faith in the promise of democratic self-government has been shattered through years of union-busting, farm foreclosures, factory exports, college grant cuts, subprime mortgage scams, and all manner of betrayal, treachery, neglect, and abuse. Over in the comments threads at Orcinus, we hear from these furious folks almost every day. The way they see it, representative democracy has repeatedly failed to deliver on anything it might have once promised them. At this point, the disgust runs so deep that anybody who's got other ideas -- theocracy, corporatocracy, anarchy, whaddaya got? -- has a fair shot at getting their attention.

And their outrage is so total that any target they're offered looks about as good as any other. Without that reason-strangling sense of betrayal and paralyzing fear of further loss already in place, it's hard to see how Fox News' windbags or Dick Armey's checkbook would have been able to convince these people to turn on the best chance at real government help they've been offered in decades. But with it, they're about ready to shoot at anything they're told to aim at.

America's best (and perhaps only) chance to keep the shreds of its tattered democracy intact is to get serious about cutting working Americans back into the democratic contract -- and repair their broken trust by making damn sure those promises are actually kept. Once they're back on board, the system will begin to work again for everyone. Until then, the accelerating breakdown is just going to continue.

It's not going to be easy. Right-wing populism is riding so high among the middle and working classes right now that there's nothing progressives can say right now that they're likely to believe. So we need to let our actions do the talking -- and there are five solid places we can start that will get their attention.

First: Ironically, passing health care reform would be a colossal trust-builder, as I've argued before. The right wing knows this, which is precisely why it's recruited the very people most likely to benefit from reform to fight as their shock troops against it. Simply seeing the government working to provide such an essential common good for everyone would shift the entire American conversation about the purposes and capabilities of government. It would go a long way toward restoring our confidence in the very idea of democracy, and make it much harder for anti-democratic arguments to get traction.

Second: We need to re-establish the rule of law. You cannot have a credible democracy as long as there's so obviously one standard of economic and civil justice for the rich and well-connected, and a very different one that's designed to make victims out of everybody else. Nobody seriously believes any more that rich or powerful people can ever be held accountable by an American court. Prosecuting the Bush Administration for their assorted crimes against America and the world would make an unforgettable, inarguable statement -- both to our own citizens, and the rest of the planet -- about our renewed commitment to justice.

That would be a great start. But we'd need to follow it up with a whole series of reforms, including holding corporations fully accountable for actions that destroy the commons; ending the catastrophic "war on drugs;" giving people back their access to the courts; and restoring some proportionality to our sentencing laws, which have put millions of lower-class families into the permanent thrall of the justice system.

Third: We need to get serious about investing in education. It's well understood now that our broken health care system is right on the bottom of the barrel among industrialized countries; but most of us don't realize that our schools are in the same comparatively wretched shape. Thomas Jefferson understood that liberal democracy is impossible without a literate, well-informed populace; and the endless parade of teabagger loonitude is precisely the kind of know-nothing nightmare he most feared.

Conservative "tax revolt" politics have been undermining American education since California's Proposition 13 passed in 1977 -- and we should draw a clear, bright line between decades of systematic defunding and the monumental failures of reason we're seeing all around us now. Don't know much about history -- so the Christian Right is busily rewriting it to argue that there's no such thing as a wall between church and state. Don't know much biology -- so fewer than half of all Americans think the theory of evolution explains our origins. Don't know much about the science book -- so we're ready to believe whatever junk science the corporate PR folks can conjure up. Don't know much about the French I took -- which has left the country insular, parochial, and unable to work and play well with others in a world it purports to lead.

But the worst failure is that we went through a decades-long patch where we didn't teach civics -- and still don't much, especially in states where it's not part of the standardized tests. Which means that there are tens of millions among us who have absolutely no idea what's in the Bill of Rights, or how a law gets made, or where the limits of state power lie. It's quite possible that if the conservatives hadn't undermined universal civics education, the right-wing talking heads would have never found an audience. Instead, what we have is a country where most people are getting their basic political education from Rush Limbaugh and FOX News.

If we want our democracy back, that has to change.

Fourth: No democracy in history has ever survived with our current levels of inequality. There's no reason for the middle and working classes to trust anything about a system that's so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy -- who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government, so they can suck up even more of our economy for themselves.

This has gone on so long that we've arrived at the endpoint where every single civic function you can name -- health care, defense, law enforcement, prisons, infrastructure development, research, media, and (increasingly) education -- makes decisions not on the basis of what will best serve the common good or give taxpayers or consumers the biggest bang for the buck, but whether and how much it will pay off some well-connected corporation. Doesn't matter what the public wants, or what makes sense, or what will save money in the long run. The bottom line is: if Haliburton or Wackenhut or United Health isn't getting their cut, it ain't happening, period. And that's pretty much the definition of a corporatized state -- which, as we've seen, is one of the two necessary ingredients required for full-on fascism.

Restoring equality also means meaningful immigration reform. As long as there's a two-tiered employment system that lets employers sidestep wage, discrimination, and safety laws by hiring undocumented workers without penalty, there's going to be a permanent trap door under the feet of American workers. To close that door, we need to shore up the border, completely revamp our utterly dysfunctional immigration process, enforce existing workplace laws and prosecute employers who violate them, and get our current crop of undocumented immigrants on the books so the laws can be applied to them, too. Until we do this, nobody is going to get a fair shake in the job market -- and there's no reason for working-class Americans to have any trust at all in the system's ability to deliver for them.

Finally: we need to focus on restoring our basic liberal institutions. Back in 2005, Chris Bowers noted that progressive ideology has always been disseminated through four major cultural drivers: the universities (and related intellectual infrastructure); unions; the media; and liberal religious organizations. Knowing this, conservatives set out back in the 1970s to undermine all four of these institutions -- and over time, they've largely succeeded in blunting their historic capacity to disseminate and perpetuate the progressive worldview.

But change is on the way. The new GI Bill, like the previous one, is likely to create an expansive renaissance in American university education, restoring vigor and diversity to our academic and intellectual community. The Employee Free Choice Act, if passed, will help unions regain their role as the voice and political muscle of the working and middle class. Bloggers have formed the core of a new progressive media that's calling the corporate media to account, and slowly forcing it to change its one-sided ways.

On the other hand, there's still considerable misunderstanding and confusion within our own camp about the essential role liberal religion should play in lending heart and spirit to the progressive resurgence. With a few notable exceptions (Tom Paine, Robert Ingersoll), American progressivism has always drawn its most compelling moral voices from the ranks of Catholics, Jews, Quakers, Unitarians and Universalists, and a wide collection of social gospel Evangelicals. And even now, the vast majority of Americans -- on both ends of the spectrum -- still draw their political ethics straight out of their personal religious beliefs. As Bowers points out: we need those voices if we're going to succeed.

Fascism is so dangerous precisely because it speaks to its believers in the language of emotion, populism, purity, redemption, and enduring values. Nobody on the progressive side knows how to speak that language -- and match that moral force and energy -- better than our own native faith groups. Secular progressives may wish it weren't true, but it is: there's simply no way we can rebuild a strong democratic system without holding up our end of a broad new culture-wide discussion about morality, meaning, priorities, passion, and values. And those conversations begin most naturally in our houses of worship.

* * *

I'm well aware that this reads like a liberal wish list. And that's really my entire point. Progressive democracy is a self-reinforcing system. Wherever you have educated citizens, thriving progressive institutions, a solid public infrastructure, fair courts, and a relatively level economic and social playing field, you've got prime growing conditions that lead to an expanding economy, increased rights and freedoms, and a strong collective sense of investment and confidence in the system. Progressivism fosters the conditions that make a nation secure, peaceful, stable, and virtually impervious to revolutions of all kinds. In particular, it creates a natural resistance that recognizes fascism as a mortal enemy, and never fails to raise effective immune antibodies against it.

Almost every conservative policy going back to Nixon has, in one way or another, undermined our ability to mount this kind of resistance. The emergence of corporate-backed brownshirts is a clear warning sign of that the system that keeps America progressive and free is now hitting its point of fatal breakdown. And we don't have much time: if their behavior succeeds and escalates in the coming months, we could be done for in a matter of months. By next August, this one may be remembered as the last moment of calm before the revolution.

Doing nothing is not an option. The only long-term antidote to our current wave of emergent fascism is a big, strong dose of trust-building progressive culture and politics, administered daily until the system's basic democratic functions come back on line. If we want to build a fascist-proof America for the long haul, we must stand up now for everything we believe, and everything we are.

Read the rest of the series:

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff
Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul

LiveBlogging Howard Dean

Sara Robinson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:54:45 -0700

Sara Robinson liveblogs Howard Dean's talk at Netroots Nation, starting at 9am ET Friday morning. Come on by and join the chat!

8:55
There are a lot of people here, considering we were all up drinking past 1 am at vodka reception given at the nearby Andy Warhol museum by an associated gaggle of gay groups. (It was totally fabulous.) Dean can turn out progressives, even at this unholy hour among this many people with hangovers.

A spirited introduction by the co-author (sorry, he said his name fast and I didn't catch it, but he's a Think Progress editor) of Howard Dean's Health Care Prescription for Real Health Care Reform. Mike Lux and Tanya Tarr will be moderating -- this should be good. I saw Tanya in a panel yesterday afternoon and found her very impressive.

9:09
Here's Dr. Dean.

The people in this room will be carrying the ball over the next 10 weeks or so: in the face of the lies, the net is the only real resource to get the truth out.

The public option cannot be compromised. We have already compromised from single payer -- this IS the compromise. We can't back off from this, because we won't get universal care without it. If people have the choice, they'll reform the system on their own.

Fifty percent of Republicans want a public option.

Tanya asks: How do we make plain English argument to people who aren't tracking this issue day by day?

Dean says: We need to control costs, without rationing. We spent 70% more than Canada or Germany, the next most expensive systems.

Eliminate fee for service medicine. They're doing this in Massachusetts. Primary care doctors here make less than they do in the UK. The public option allows for the market to reform itself.

Control costs. Medicare is structurally able to do this in a way that private medicine can't. Costs have gone up at 2.5x the rate of inflation on the private side, which strains businesses' competitiveness. Medicare, on the other hand, goes up 2% a year. It's much better controlled.

Mike asks a funny pseudo-question from a "death panel" grognard. Dean says: These meetings are not about health care. He says he gets smart questions from conservatives at book signings, and they're not shouting. But the teabaggers have been running on anger for 30 years-- Karl Rove used to talk about polling for anger points, looking for ways to incite activism around race and other issues.

He also notes that this group skews older -- these are not the generation that voted for Obama, and they're threatened and angry by the younger uprising. They are contentious and polarized (and have always done politics that way); but the younger generation does it differently. They are aging, losing power, and getting smaller. And they have a president "who's not accustomed to what they're seeing in the White House." Dean notes that he saw people like this when he signed Vermont's civil union bill, which got a lot of pushback from moderates who had supported him. He needed police protection for a while after that. That's what's going on: people are resisting change.

People don't know what's in the bill. They don't even want to know. This isn't about health care; it's about a generational transition.

Tanya asks: What happens to reproductive choice in this bill? How do we ensure choice is protected?

Dean replies: we're really discussing what the public option will cover; whatever's in the bill won't dictate to private insurers what they'll cover.

And the actual benefit package hasn't been determined yet. That comes later. So anybody who says that this issue has been settled simply doesn't know what's going on.

In the end, we need to let the as-yet unnamed benefits panel, which will be made up of fairly distinguished health care providers, decide. He doubts they'll "break new ground" in changing abortion access.

Mike asks: How has the politics around this changed?

Dean says: It's changed a lot. The fact that the other side is reduced to making things up and acting out tells how how done and over this really is. He also thinks the Blue Dogs contributed to the conversation, holding up the conservative arguments when the Republicans themselves would not. The Blue Dogs insisted on protections for small businesses under half a million bucks, which Dean supports. (He doesn't discuss what happens to their employees. People in the room are shaking their heads.)

He predicts that the bill will be settled in reconciliation and get passed. It'll be ugly, but it'll pass.

Mike asks about single payer, which has a lot of supporters in the room. Why didn't the Democrats start with that as an opening position, and then retreat to public option as a compromise point?

Dean: This was a mistake, and was a holdover from the old way of Democratic politics. "Single payer" was seen as a bad word, and taking it off the table was seen as necessary to "reasonable" debate. But the other side isn't interest in debate. The public option is the compromise -- it's OK, but we can't back off of it.

The fact about single-payer is that it's more efficient -- only about 4% goes to overhead, versus non-profit private at 12% and for-profit at 20%. We should have gone that route.

Tanya: How do we involve more health care professionals in this debate? She's heard from people whose doctors are telling them scare stories.

Dean: The polling on this is interesting. When the AMA endorses Henry Waxman's bill, that's a remarkable moment. For 15 years, the insurers have treated both doctors and patients so badly that the majority of physicians now favor single-payer. They've figured out they stand to make more money, or at least have better working conditions and the ability to provide better care.

Mike: He was recently in Oregon, doing a panel. A medical student asked him about the way new doctors are incentivized to go into specialties, and forego family practice.

Dean: Medicare rates are too low, and this has a lot to do with it. In Vermont, they raised those rates -- and some insurers left, which was fine, because they didn't need those companies anyway. If you make under $66K a year in Vermont, the kids in your family (up to age 18) are covered for $480 a year. They raised pediatricians' reimbursement rates at the same time.

Doctors go into specialties because they've got massive education debt that's hard to pay off if you're in primary care.

Also: A well-qualified nurse practitioner can do about 60% of what doctor can do. We should be relying more on NPs. The best quality of an NP is how well they know what they don't know, and how willing they are to refer up to the doctor. He advocates independent NP practices, especially in rural areas; helping primary care doctors pay off their debts; and federally-qualified health centers -- clinics where people can get low-cost primary care.

Some of these things are in the health care bill as it stands now.

9:36
Tanya: A local candidate from NY asks: How to frame the health care conversation for a local campaign?

Dean: The American people have made it clear this is what they want. Are you going to represent your donors, or your constituents? We'll find out and talk about it during the election campaign.

Right now, the only choice people have is to sign a contract they can get kicked out of any time. The health care companies are Wall Street flim-flam; they're in the business to make money, not provide care. The public option will incentivize them to become more consumer friendly.

Mike: How do we make sure these new plans are affordable for everyone?

Dean: The public option, and the competition it provides, is the most important part of this. Primary care physicians don't like the way they're practicing now, which incentivizes them to practice bad medicine. The public option allows them to do things differently, and may actually allow them to innovate new kinds of cost controls that aren't possible in the current system.

Tanya: How do we maintain innovation?

Dean: There is a role for the private sector in medicine. We bash the pharmaceutical companies, but they're only 10% of our medical expenditures. Still, they drive innovation, and that should continue. (And they shouldn't be allowed to advertise.)

The public option will help us move from an illness model to a wellness model of medicine. The big innovators now are big co-op type companies like Kaiser. They change the incentives toward wellness. Some of the big companies that self-insure are also being pro-active: taking the crap out of the cafeteria, setting up health clubs for employees -- this is an investment in lower costs. They get that a wellness model works better for everyone.

A public option will allow us to bring that kind of thinking to national health care.

9:47
Mike: Should President Obama focus on bipartisanship when no Republicans are going to vote for this anyway?

Dean: Obama's playing this well. He's letting the Republicans speak for themselves, in saying they want this to fail so Obama will fail. He's forcing them to show their true colors.

Mike: About co-ops. Some senators from rural states are proposing this. Other people are pointing out that there are problems with this (using electric co-ops as a model). What about this?

Dean: Kent Conrad is a friend -- but he's wrong about this. It's a political compromise, not a policy one, and it won't work.

They're too small to do any good. And we already tried this: Blue Cross/Blue Shield was a non-profit co-op, and now it's a private insurance company just as bad as any of the rest. We don't want to make it easier for the insurance companies to come in and co-opt the co-ops. They're too small. The insurance companies will come in and undercut them and drive them out of business.

They will not work.

9:51
Q&As from the audience:

Jill from Ohio: How do we keep mental health parity as part of this discussion?

Dean: This was one of his first issues in the Vermont legistator. We have a national mental health bill now, but it's really up to the benefits panel when it's convened. They need to provide a benefit; but they'll settle the limits and other details.

We're also starting to realize the degree to which brain health is integrated into the rest of our health. We're moving closer to a medical model of mental illness, which means there's less reason to treat it differently. I hope the benefits panel will take that into account.

Another blogger: How do we talk about this in our work? How do we keep it simple?

Dean: This is not about refuting right-wing death panels and other lies.

This is about: Are we going to let the American people choose for themselves? Are we going to give them a full range of choices, or let Washington choose?

Whose side are you? The American people have spoken. Legislators need to choose who they work for -- and be prepared for the usual consequences that come to people who don't work in the best interests of their employers.

Another blogger: Won't the plan just stick us with the bill for high-risk people?

Dean: No. The bill eliminates restricting insurance on the basis of pre-existing conditions. There are a disproportionate people in the uninsured pool that are high-risk, but it's not overwhelmingly disproportionate. Also, the difference in overhead rates will give the public option more money to deal with increased risk. Finally: So what? These people are getting bad health care in emergency rooms, and we're paying for that now anyway via taxes. At the end of the day, we may end up paying less, because these people will be getting more rational and consistent care. It'll all work out pretty much evenly.

Mike: A questioner is skeptical of the small business exemption. In the Clinton plan, we tried to subsidize small business to the point where big businesses rebelled -- and we lost their support. Should small business have to pay into the pot, or exempted entirely?

Dean: Big business gets a lot of breaks from Congress and the taxpayers. It has no right to complain about the few subsidies small businesses get. These businesses create 80% of all new jobs in America. I'd say anybody with under a million dollars in revenue or fewer than 50 employees should be exempt from this.

I'm not pushing this (though it was part of my 2004 platform). I don't think we need a mandate. It won't be popular -- though Republicans are also mandating that we stick with the system we have now.

Also: We should give people under 30 the same Medicare we give people under 65. They're cheap to insure since they're generally healthy, they're not heavy users, they're hard to get signed up for anything, they're moving constantly and hard to keep insured. We did it for $480 a year in Vermont.

For the over 55s, I'd let them buy into Medicare. The public option advances that. This lets us do a lot of cost controls -- this is in the bill.

I wouldn't do away with employer-based insurance, though I argue for this in the book. People like it. They get good benefits, even though they're expensive. CEOs like it, for reasons that aren't quite reasonable. And America is a conservative country: we think we want change, but we won't always vote for it.

So we need to give Americans the choice, and Obama's bill does that.

We have failed to insure Americans -- not only because the insurance companies, but because 80% of us have insurance, and 60% have good insurance. They don't want to change. We need to let people experience an alternative, and let them make the choice. This allows the pace of reform to go at a pace people will be comfortable with.

Mike: Last question. What can we bloggers do to make health reform happen this year?

Dean: More than most people. Go to StandWithDrDean.com and find out what you can do. Bill Press's website list legislators we need to work on. E-mail them and ask what these Democrats are doing to pass the Democratic President's bill. Make sure they get contacted by people in their states.

This is even working on Max Baucus: he's going home to Montana and getting an earful. He knows he has to get a bill out of his committee with zero Republican votes, so he's got to work with the Democrats. In the end, I think we're going to get almost every Democrat in the Senate, because they know people want this.

For legislators, this is a choice between the insurance companies and the people who voted for them. We can be polite, but firm. We have made our compromise. There will be no more compromises. We expect them do what we elected them to do.

(And the crowd goes wild.)

Follow ups: Organizing for America is rounding up bloggers to do phone banking today for health care reform. (We're trying to get 10,000 calls out today.)

Dean's going out canvassing in Pittsburgh tomorrow with SEIU.

Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff

Sara Robinson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:15:51 -0700

Writing about fascism for an American audience is always a fraught business. Invariably, a third of the readers will dismiss the topic (and your faithful blogger's basic sanity) out of hand. Either they've got their own definition of fascism and whatever's going on doesn't seem to fit it; or else they're firm believers in a variant of Godwin's Law, which says (with some justification) that anyone who invokes the F-word is a de facto alarmist of questionable credibility. I get letters, most of which say something to the effect of, "Calm down. You're overreacting. We're nowhere near there yet."

Another third will pepper me with missives that are every bit as dismissive -- for exactly the opposite reason. To them, anyone who's been paying the barest amount of attention should realize that America has been a fascist state since (choose one:) 1) 9/11; 2) Reagan; 3) McCarthy; 4) The Civil War; 5) July 4, 1776. For them, my careful analysis and worried warnings are dangerously naive -- clear evidence that I'm simply not seeing the full horror of America as it truly is, and always has been, at least since (insert date here).

Given this general crankiness, I probably wouldn't bother with the subject at all -- except for that final third who keep me going. From them, I've gotten a blizzard of anecdotes, questions, meditations, ideas, suggestions, manifestos, and love letters (including lots of link love). The piece sparked a lot of conversation all across Left Blogistan about what fascism is and what it ain't and what we need to be watching for. And that kind of thoughtful discussion is exactly what I hoped for. I wanted people to start paying attention.

In the previous post, I pointed out that the most insidious part of fascism is that by the time it's finally obvious to absolutely everyone that these people are dangerously out of control, it's too late to do anything about it. Early warnings are even more valuable here than they are in most domains. And since futurists are -- more than anything -- in the business of early warnings, it falls to me to step up there and point out that according to at least a few of the more reputable atlases in the glove box, this looks a lot like the last turn into the parking lot of downtown Fascist Hell.

The good news is: we're not yet parked and locked, let alone committed to entering the building. (Which is good, because the doors appear to be all one way, just like in the Hotel California.) We've still got a few minutes left to change our minds, back out of this, and go spend our future somewhere else. But we are now actively in the process of choosing, whether we're aware of it or not. There are things happening now that are setting us on a course that may prove impossible to change.

How do we turn back? A few basic principles:

First: The teabaggers must not win this one. Back in elementary school, most of us learned that when a bully learns that intimidation and threats work, he'll will keep doing more of it. In fact, the longer he goes without comeuppance, the bolder and badder he becomes, and the harder it is to make him stop. Every success teaches him something new about how to use terror for maximum effect, and tempts him to push the envelope and see what else he can get away with. Do nothing, and he'll soon take over the whole playground.

And it happens like this for bullies in groups, too. Living in a fascist regime is just living in a town dominated by the Mob, a street gang, the KKK, or a corrupt sheriff. It only takes a small handful of thugs to terrorize people into giving up their civil rights, abandoning democracy, and doing what they're told, just so they can keep their jobs, windows, and families intact. The main imperative in life becomes staying off the goons' radar. All the enforcers need to do is make an horrific example out of one or two troublemakers every now and then -- and the resulting fear will keep everybody else quietly in line.

Conservatives have tried to subdue other Americans this way for centuries, so there's nothing new going on here. And this is the way they've always done it: they used race (and yes, the birthers and anti-health care rioters are, at root, all about race) and economic calamity to whip up a posse of terrified, well-armed vigilantes, and then turned them loose on society to "enforce order." Given their colossal investment in organizing and indoctinating the teabaggers, we'd be stupid to believe that this is all going to go away when Congress returns to DC in September. Having had a taste of power and publicity, these newly-empowered mobs are very likely to stick around town and see what else they can do to keep the muck stirred up.

Our choice now is a stark one: knock them back while they're still new, small, and not yet entrenched; or deal with them later, when they've got some real power to fight back with, and the cost to all of us will be so much higher.

Second: Think nationally, fight locally. The conservatives are running this effort as a national campaign -- but that's not where the real fight is. The terror that fuels fascism is always intensely, intimately local in scale. Fascist goon squads always recruit from the neighborhood -- they're built on people you know. Since that's where they start, that's where they have to be stopped.

This is why all the best tactics involve community-level action. The high-level fight in Congress and the media is already underway, and the Democratic leadership is fighting it with unusual elan. But anybody who sits this one out because they assume that the folks in DC have it all handled for them shouldn't be surprised when they start getting "special treatment" from longtime neighbors, or discover that they can't park their car downtown any more without having it vandalized. That's just the next baby step up from where we are now; and in some places, it's already started to happen. Winning this means getting out there and defending our community's standards and boundaries now, while they're still there to be defended.

Third: Brush up on our non-violent resistance -- but leave the heavy lifting and rough enforcement to the cops. It's true that the only way to stop a bully is to stand up to them. But there are ways to stand up to them that don't involve getting down to the eye-for-an-eye level.

Back home, we had a saying: Never mudwrestle a pig. You will lose, and the pig enjoys it. If we meet thuggery with thuggery, we will lose, because they're just plain better at it. And make no mistake: they will enjoy it. Right now, the right wing is looking -- hard -- to make the case that they're the innocent victim, and the left instigated this whole thing. This quote from religious right organizer Gary Bauer is typical of the genre:

My fear, given the stakes and emotions on both sides, is that union thugs, ACORN activists and leftwing anarchists (who ransacked the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul during last year's Republican National Convention) will turn violent and innocent people will get hurt. If that happens, the radical Left will bear the responsibility for demonizing free speech.

The Nazis used this kind of victim-blaming to tremendous effect as they built up their party. We must not -- must not -- give our proto-brownshirts any basis to make the same kind of argument. (Of course, the absence of evidence will only drive them to make up fake victims; but then we get to call them out as whining liars with a big fat persecution complex, which is always a fun way to spend a news cycle or two.)

It's about the moral high ground, people. Any choices we make must be consistent with our own values, or we betray both ourselves and the country. Standing up for health care reform is important; but before that, the country needs to see us standing up for civil discourse and the right to democratic free speech. Since we're defending the rule of law, our best tactic is to use that law. You have a right to attend a public meeting and speak your mind in a civil, respectful manner. You do not have a right to be disruptive, or deprive other people of their right to be heard. And most jurisdictions have laws about disturbing the peace and creating a public nuisance -- laws, let's not forget, that the Bush regime didn't hesitate to stretch until the elastic gave out against people who merely showed up at meetings with the wrong bumper stickers or T-shirts.

Since we're not Bush goons, we can't go around arresting people who haven't yet broken any laws. But when people -- from either side -- cross that line, it's time for the cops and prosecutors to make the point for us: bullying people in a public meeting (or anywhere else) is illegal, and will not be tolerated in this county.

Fourth: We need to make absolutely sure that the media get the story right. The teabaggers would run out of power with the flick of a switch if the media would just turn off their cameras. But the cold reality is that this kind of drama is a real ratings-booster. It would be like telling lions to lay off that dead elephant carcass. Left alone, the media (local news in particular) will turn these people into cultural heroes. They couldn't turn their backs on this if the republic depended on it.

Since we can't beat 'em, we'll have to join 'em. The best cure for bad speech is always more speech. This means bringing cameras and documenting everything, getting it up on YouTube, and blogging it. It also means coordinating rapid-response letter-writing to the local paper, and keeping down-home reporters well-fed every single day with some new theme that reinforces the idea of concerned non-partisan citizens trying to keep control over their democratic discourse in the face of organized thugs. Since the media is watching, let's make sure they see it all.

Fifth: Support legislators who don't show fear. The Democratic Party seems to be playing this just right (so far). The leadership has made it known that these noisy, scary people don't represent the 73% of Americans who support health care reform. The GOP is running the risk of being marginalized as not only the Party of No, but the Party of Moonbat Crazy.

If you've never attended a public meeting in your life, August 2009 is the month you need to start. Your congressperson's website probably lists a schedule, or at least a number you can call to inquire. But that's just a first step. Do more. Write. Call. Find out where your local congressional office is, and just drop by when you're in the neighborhood. Tell the staff how you feel -- about health care reform, about the teabaggers, about your legislator's brave stance in the face of this. If they're showing stress, encourage them to stand firm. A constituent in the office counts for thousands writing e-mails, so an in-person visit is 15 minutes incredibly well-spent.

One visit or call is good. More is better. Put it in your schedule to contact your representatives at least once a week for the duration, and make sure they're not buckling under the pressure.

Sixth: Shut down the hate talkers. In most parts of the country, the teabaggers are coming straight out of right-wing talk radio audiences. For hours every day, they're mainlining raw emotion and toxic misinformation. They're going put your kids before "death panels!" They're going to kill your granny! You're going to have to call the White House to get a bone set! You'll be a Real American Hero if you get out there and join the "resistance!" Cutting off this endless torrent of lies, fear-mongering, and validation will go a long way toward powering down the whole movement. (Conversely, what happens when these kinds of radio instigators are left to spin it all the way out to the end can be summed up in two words: Radio Rwanda.)

The basic recipe: Record their shows. Take notes of anything they say that is intimidating, threatening, or aimed at inciting violence against a named target. And while you're at it, note every single advertiser they have.

Then: write a polite letter the CEOs of the sponsoring companies. Throw them some choice quotes from these shows, and ask them if this is the kind of thing they want their product associated with. (Point out that if their own employees said things like this at work, they'd be fired on the spot.) Often, the CEO has no clue that any of this is happening, and will pull the ads as soon as she finds out what's being done in her name. This has worked extremely well -- and quickly -- at both the local and national level.

Finally: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Even if we succeed this time, let's not kid ourselves that this is over. The conservatives are investing a lot of money and effort to build a mass movement that's explicitly aimed at destroying a Democratic government -- and if we learned anything from the Clinton years, it's that they're not going to let up for a second as long as the Democrats are in control.

This is our new reality -- and it comes straight out of Hitler's playbook (check out Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf). Their intention is to keep the outrage junkies high by giving the a never-ending supply of new made-up reasons to act out. When the birth certificate fracas cools, they're standing by with "death panels." When that one's run its course, there will be something else -- over and over, every few weeks for as long as the Dems rule.

Which means that even if we win this round, we can't stand down. We're going to be pushing back against these bullies, over and over, for the next three to seven years.

There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they're going to get very good at public intimidation, and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule. That's how it's going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.

Next week: Fascist-proofing America for the long haul

Read the rest of the series:

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff
Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?

Sara Robinson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:23:06 -0700

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.

What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:

"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Elsewhere, he refines this further as

"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

.
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.

From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.

In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.

Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.

As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.

In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.

Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.

Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:

1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?

By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.

The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.

What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.

Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)

It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.

How do we pull back? That's my next post.

Tip o' the hat to Chip Berlet and Steven Martin for their research help and encouragement.

Read the rest of the series:

Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
Fascist America II: The Last Turnoff
Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul

Firing Back on the Birthers: Where's Their Evidence?

Sara Robinson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:13:33 -0700

Amid the huge media pile-on that's gradually taking down the Birther fantasy, nobody's actually bothered to point out that almost every element of their argument is based on a near-total ignorance about how U.S. citizenship works.

There's nothing like moving abroad (which I did five years ago) to make you acutely aware of exactly what being an American citizen means, and who gets to claim it, and how that privilege is gained or lost. Living abroad is a sort of involuntary immersive education in citizenship law. My life, liberty, and property depend daily on the agreements worked out between my home country and my adopted one; and even the most mundane travel and financial choices are deeply affected by the rights and protections granted to me by each country. (If you think dealing with one federal tax authority is bad, try reconciling the demands of two.) Based on this working understanding of U.S. citizenship, three things have become obvious to me:

Those promoting the Birther fiction don't have the first clue about almost anything having to do with how American citizenship really works.
Given that Dr. Orly Taitz (one of the main poo-stirrers spinning the fan in this fracas) is herself both an immigrant and a licensed member of the California bar, she should presumably know this stuff cold. But the national case that she's built almost entirely on spurious legal fictions is one of incompetence.
The Google's been around for over a decade now, but nobody on the right seems to have figured out how to use it yet. You can find confirmation for most of what I'm about to tell you in about 0.86 seconds, assuming you can type and spell and think well enough to concoct a basic search string. Apparently, nobody in Birtherland has that level of skill.

I'm well aware that trying to introduce objective reality into this whole irrationally absurd mess is probable futile. We all know that a conservative whose mind is that thoroughly made up (in both senses of the phrase) will never be persuaded by mere facts. Still, there are people out there—especially on our side—who are reality-based enough that this kind of information will matter. So I'm giving it the old Firing Back try. Here's the rundown:

1. Obama doesn't have a valid birth certificate. Or if he has, nobody's ever seen it.

False. A sealed (stamped, in other words) copy of Obama's official state-issued birth certificate has been available since spring of last year to anyone who wanted to view it. Many media outlets, from factcheck.org to World Net Daily, took them up on it. (The factcheck.org piece pretty much takes apart every possible objection.)

When a birther screeches, "I DEMAND that he present his birth certificate," ask them: Present it to whom? When? In what form? Under what circumstances? What would you consider to be sufficient evidence? It's apparently not good enough that the Obama campaign presented it freely to reporters -- or even that World Net Daily verified it.

Under this line of questioning, it will soon become obvious that anybody making this demand will accept no proof short of holding it in their own hands and seeing it with their own eyes -- which ain't gonna happen. At some point, they're going to need to drop the paranoia and trust somebody to do the vetting for them. Who would they accept as a proxy? Odds are, there's nobody whose word they'd be willing to take.

And that admission, right there, makes it very clear to anyone watching that this person doesn't actually give a damn about actual evidence.

2. A "certificate of live birth" is not the same thing as a "birth certificate.".

False. They are, for all functional purposes, the same thing.

The best comeback to this is to ask the blithering birther if they've got an official copy of their own birth certificate at home. If so, tell them to go take a look at it: In a lot of counties across the country, it, too, will be headed "Certificate of Live Birth." If they have a problem with that, they need to take it up with their county clerk's office, who will be glad to set them straight on this point.

The U.S. government recognizes no effective distinction between a "Certificate of Live Birth" and a birth certificate. The government will accept a sealed "Certificate of Live Birth" as sufficient evidence of citizenship in all circumstances. So do banks, notaries, corporations, and all private entities that ask for birth certs as a form of ID. (I have a lifetime history of passports, bank accounts, stock purchases, notarized contracts, marriage licenses, international visas, and even a foreign green card issued on the strength of my own "Certificate of Live Birth." None of the officials I've ever dealt with have had a moment's quibble with this document.)

This argument does have interesting roots, though. The far-right racist Sovereign Citizen movement has long made a lucrative business out of making up and "teaching" phony theories of citizenship that have no relationship with actual American law. (These theories, of course, are mostly aimed at proving that only native-born white males have any rights worth respecting in America. And yes, the perpetrators of this fraud have frequently gone to jail for it.)

This "live birth" controversy is merely the latest in a long series of efforts by racists to concoct some kind of new, rarified standard of citizenship that has nothing to do with the standards set by the government itself. In that, it's a clear statement that the Birthers don't regard the US government as legitimate; and there's a nasty racist undercurrent at work here that's trying very hard to disqualify Barack Obama from the presidency because he's black (since everybody knows black people aren't Real Americans).

3. The birth certificate matters.
4. Where he was born matters.
5. The citizenship of his father matters.

False. None of this matters. The only thing that matters is whether or not his mother was a U.S. citizen.

Accept, for the sake of argument, the unproven contention that Obama was born abroad. In that case, according to the U.S. State Department's website, here's the rule that applies:

A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child's birth....For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.

Nobody has yet tried to argue that Obama's mother wasn't a citizen. According to everything we know about her, she was born and raised in the U.S. And that, right there, is enough to establish the American birthright citizenship of her son. Nothing else is required.

The birthers insist that the above clause doesn't apply because 1) she was living abroad when she had him (though they have never provided proof of this claim); and 2) Obama's mother was only 18 when she had him, which means that she hadn't yet completed the "five years after the age of 14" part of the residency requirements. In other words: Assuming Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii (a big leap right there), his mother was a year too young to transmit citizenship.

Let's invite the birthers to take this into court, and see what happens. I suspect that no judge in the land would be willing to set a precedent that would revoke the citizenship of all children of alien fathers born abroad to American mothers simply because of the mother's age. I mean, seriously. If Mom was 20 when you were born, you're a citizen—but if she was 18, you're not? Sorry. The law is badly worded, granted; but unlike the birthers, the government takes citizenship much too seriously to revoke it on the basis of that kind of trivial loophole.

This point is critical, because Stanley Ann Dunham's own unequivocal citizenship status makes the whole fuss over the birth certificate, his father's nationality, or the place of birth totally irrelevant. If his father was the Man in the Moon and she'd birthed him in low-gravity orbit around Mars, he'd still be a US citizen on the strength of her citizenship (plus, as we'll see below, her decision to raise him in the US) alone.

6. Obama's mother renounced his citizenship while the family was living in Indonesia.

No such evidence. The story here is that Obama's mother listed him as "Indonesian" when filling out an elementary school application; and this is taken as evidence that she renounced U.S. citizenship on his behalf.

Trust me: It takes a hell of a lot more than this to renounce a U.S. citizenship. Again, according to the U.S. State Department's website, there are three non-negotiable steps that must be taken to renounce one's American citizenship:

A person wishing to renounce his or her U.S. citizenship must voluntarily and with intent to relinquish U.S. citizenship:

appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer,

in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate); and

sign an oath of renunciation

Renunciations that do not meet the conditions described above have no legal effect. Because of the provisions of section 349(a)(5), Americans cannot effectively renounce their citizenship by mail, through an agent, or while in the United States. In fact, U.S. courts have held certain attempts to renounce U.S. citizenship to be ineffective on a variety of grounds ...

The website goes on to say that you cannot renounce your citizenship via any agent—you have to do it in person, yourself. And the regulations state very specifically that parents absolutely cannot take this step on behalf of their minor children. Furthermore, in practice it's vanishingly rare for American consulate staffers to accept a renunciation attempt made by anybody under the age of 18.

The State Department keeps very careful records on people who renounce their citizenship. If the birthers want us to take the "renunciation" argument seriously, they need to start by producing valid government paperwork proving that Barack Obama, in person, appeared before a U.S. consulate officer and executed an oath of reununciation. We're waiting....

7. The fact that his father was Kenyan makes him a dual citizen, and thus ineligible to be President.

False (with a little True mixed in).

The true part: Obama did hold dual Kenyan citizenship until he was 21 years old— and automatically lost it on his 21st birthday. Under Kenyan law, he would have had to return to live in Kenya and claim that citizenship in order to retain it. Since he didn't, he lost it. The only citizenship he still holds is American.

If, by chance, Obama had retained that citizenship, there would be government documents proving it. Until they can produce such documents, the birthers have zero evidence for any kind of Kenyan connection.

Not that even that would matter anyway. The bottom line here is that the United States government doesn't recognize any form of dual citizenship. At all. In the government's eyes, if you're an American citizen, that's the only citizenship that matters—no matter which other countries may also try to claim you. (This is why dual American/Canadian citizens can't show a Canadian passport when crossing into the U.S.. As far as the US border officers are concerned, you're an American, period -- and they want to see your American passport. The red Canadian one cuts no ice with ICE.)

8. Obama's 1981 trip to Pakistan proves must have had Indonesian or Kenyan citizenship, because Americans couldn't go to Pakistan then.

Not only can't they manage Google; they can't even manage a calendar.

If the birthers are making any kind of claim that involves a sequence of dates, don't take it at face value. They seem to have a really hard time with keeping timelines straight.

According to factcheck.org, the New York Times travel section ran an article in August 1981 offering tips for American tourists wanting to travel to Pakistan. As you can see here, 30-day visas were readily available; no State Department advisories are mentioned; and the Pakistani government was welcoming American travelers to Lahore. So Obama could readily have taken this trip on his U.S. passport.

(Another common timeline distortion is the argument that Obama can't possibly be an American citizen, because Hawaii wasn't a state in 1961. In fact, Hawaii became a state in 1959. You could look it up.)

9. He used a Social Security number from a dead person.

Show your work, please.

Dr. Orly Taitz, mentioned above, has been making the rounds (most recently, on The Colbert Report) claiming that she's found 149 addresses and 39 different Social Security numbers linked to Obama—one of them from a man who would now be 119 years old.

Uh-huh. Back in the early 50s, Joe McCarthystood up on the floor of Congress and claimed to be holding a file proving that there were 205 (or 57 -- the number varied on any given day) known Communists working in the federal government , too. Nobody ever saw what was in that file—William Manchester once speculated it might have been his laundry list—but Congress took his word for it, and the witch hunt was on.

Sorry, birthers. We don't take the right wing's word for this kind of stuff any more. If Dr. Taitz wants us to take her seriously, we need to see her evidence and evaluate it for ourselves. Until she does that, there's nothing about this claim that's credible.

10. Somewhere, there exists evidence that the Birthers will find acceptable.

We wish.

The bottom line on shutting up a birther is to ask him or her: What would it take for you to drop this idea, and accept that you're wrong about Barack Obama? Specifically—what evidence, delivered where, evaluated by whom?

I'd lay better than even odds that they won't have an answer to this question, because this whole fantasy is entirely faith-based and thus impervious to all real-world evidence. Forcing them to come up with an acceptable refutation at least gets them to start thinking about this in reality-based terms.

We also need to point out—loudly— that they are demanding a standard of evidence from us that they are not willing to apply to themselves. If they want to be taken seriously, we demand that they start by producing the following documents:

Actionable evidence—the kind that you can take to court and make a serious case with -- that Barack Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is fraudulent. (It's already been thrown out of court at least once.)
Irrefutable documentation proving that Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii.
Government records proving that Obama made an approved adult application for citizenship in another country.
State Department records proving that he voluntarily renounced his citizenship of his own accord in the presence of a foreign consulate officer.
A list of the multiple SSID numbers he's purported to have used.

Out here in the reality-based world, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Until we see the same level of evidence from them that they're demanding from us, there's no reason we should consider any of their accusations legitimate.

The Health Care Debate: Another Country Heard From

Sara Robinson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:38:42 -0700

One of the big differences between the 1993 Hillarycare debate and our current conversation is that we're hearing a lot more fact and lot less fiction about how other countries' systems actually work.

Thank the Internet. Back in 1993, the "Harry and Louise" ads succeeded because most Americans didn't have access to any other sources of information. Now, the whole world is at our fingertips. Anybody who really wants to know how health care is managed in Canada, or the UK, or Japan, or Australia can readily find someone with real experience in those systems who can tell their stories.

But progressive Americans living overseas aren't waiting around any more for y'all to ask. Some of us are getting proactive about sending our stories home. All around the world, there are millions of American citizens who have first-hand experience with other countries' health care systems. And Democrats Abroad, the world's largest political gathering of expatriate Americans, is getting us organized to tell our stories.

In an effort launched by my friend Lauren Shannon, an old-line Deanic who heads up DA Japan, DA started compiling a collections of stories and resources from American expats back in April. (The Health Care for America website has some of their gleanings here.) This week, Democrats Abroad Canada -- the largest of all the DA national chapters -- started leaning on its tens of thousands of members to ratchet up the pressure on the Congress folks and the newspapers back home.

(Procedural note: American expats register to vote in the last state they lived in before leaving the US. We can only vote for federal offices -- Congress, Senate, and President -- and thus our absentee votes don't have any effect on state or local politics. But expat voters -- many thousands of them, in some states -- can provide a significant margin in presidential elections, and we can also give our members of Congress an international perspective they might not otherwise get.)

Here are DA Canada's health care talking points -- the story those of us who live north of the border really want our fellow Americans to understand about the Canadian health care system:

It’s less expensive: It’s well known that Canada spends less of its budget on health care than the U. S. does, but anti single-payer propaganda says that Canadians pay more taxes. What they leave out is the chunk of money Americans pay to their insurance companies. If you add that amount to taxes you would find that, in sum, Canadians pay less.

No bureaucracy gets between you and your doctor: Despite propaganda from U.S. insurance companies, the Canadian system does not force patients to go through the government to get to their doctor. In fact, it’s pretty old-fashioned: you choose a doctor and make an appointment, show your health insurance card, and that’s it. If your doctor thinks you need to see a specialist or get further tests, he/she does not have to consult an insurance bureaucrat. If your specialist thinks you need an operation, you get it – without a stack of forms to fill out.

It’s user-friendly. Unlike the U.S. system, you don’t have to fear that an illness will strike you or a loved one and lead you into bankruptcy. You don’t have to master the minutiae of co-pays and all of the methods the insurance companies use to outsmart their clients. Just that lack of stress is a health benefit in itself.

Employers: The pro-insurance propaganda says that most people get health care through their employers. What about the people who lose their jobs, or are afraid to quit and try something else? They live in fear. Also, it is often said that small businesses provide the largest percentage of jobs in America. Many simply cannot afford health care for their employees.

Proof that the Canadian system works: Since l966, when national health care was voted in – strongly opposed by the Canadian Medical Association - it has been considered one of the most important benefits of living in Canada. “Don’t mess with health care” is a message that Canadian politicians have been getting for over 40 years. Any candidate for national office who wants a U.S.-style system would lose - no doubt about it. This is not to say that there’s no room for improvement – even in the best of systems, there’s room for refinement. And when a system is under-funded or mismanaged, it’s not going to work as well as it was meant to.

In the U.S., polls show that support for the public option is very high - and growing. When it comes to the most comprehensive and least expensive (for the national budget and the individual wallet) health care, you just can’t fool all of the people forever.

But don't just take it from the expats. Foreign nationals working in America are weighing in, too. Over at HuffPo yesterday, another friend, Canadian-born Ian Walsh, shared his, um, visceral appreciation of his home country's system:

In 1993, at the age of 25, I became very ill with ulcerative colitis. I was hospitalized, and put on very expensive drugs. About a week after being hospitalized, the nurse watching me called in my doctors on a Sunday because I was deteriorating so fast -- pain killers were no longer having any effect (i.e., high doses of morphine were not working), I wouldn't let anyone touch me, and I was becoming delirious. At about midnight, they wheeled me into the operating chamber and took out my large intestine. While they were digging around, they found out I had appendicitis, and they took that out too. It would have burst within 2 days, and in my weakened state, it would have killed me.

Unfortunately, one of the treatments for ulcerative colitis involves immune suppressing drugs. My immune system basically shut down, my liver almost shut down, and I spent almost another 3 months in the hospital, riddled with extremely painful and crippling infections and other problems. At one point I was on 9 drugs; one of them was an antibiotic so expensive that only a single doctor in the hospital could approve it. My gastroenterologist called the treatment the equivalent of "pouring gold dust into your veins." I wasted away, my weight dropping below 90 lbs. I often joke that I was old young: I've used a walker, crutches and cane.

The ultimate point of my story is simple: I got the care I needed, when I needed it, and I never paid a single red cent.

Which is good, because I couldn't have afforded to pay. I was young and had very little money. The kind of care I received, even back then, would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the U.S.

If I had lived in the U.S., my parents would have faced a choice between paying for my incredibly expensive treatment or watching me die. They were both old and it would have wiped out their savings entirely and thrown them into bankruptcy. Frankly, I don't know how they could have supported themselves. My life, at that cost, would have had too high a price. I wonder how many Americans have had to make that calculation.

But I survived, and neither I, nor my parents, was bankrupted. In similar circumstances I doubt all of those things would be true for an American 25-year-old trying to survive the same medical condition in America's health care industry.

"Harry and Louise" were a fiction. So (largely) is the story of Shona Holmes, the GOP's current poster girl for the alleged "failures" of Canadian health care. That's all the conservatives have in this debate: made-up stories and the usual heaping helping of fearmongering.

What they haven't counted on is the fact that neither they nor the insurance companies they shill for have even the barest shred of credibility with the American people. Both factions have proven, beyond argument, that they're willing to sacrifice 22,000 American lives every year in the name of profit -- and that this mini-genocide is now far more salient to most of us than anything they could possibly have to say.

And they haven't counted on the fact that the majority of Americans now have access to a global network of online acquaintances with whom they have far more reliably trustworthy relationships, and who will give them the straight story.

If you are reading this from inside the US, don't take the propagandists' word for it. Google up some people who've actually seen doctors in other countries, and ask them how it really works for them. And if you're a fellow expat, take a minute right now and write a note to your congressman back home, a letter to the editor of your hometown paper, and an e-mail blast to all your friends and relatives. Tell your story -- the good and the bad, the similarities and differences, the things you miss and the things you're amazed by.

The best way to dispel the great choking cloud of mendacity issuing from the insurance lobby is to take this conversation global, and hear first-hand from the people who've been there, done that. There's a big wide world of insight and experience out there -- and tapping into that could very well make all the difference in whether or not the US finally gets health care that works.