March 20, 2010

Nobody’s Pawn

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 5:41 pm

It was probably inevitable that this would happen, but let me go on record that, as we approach a likely final vote on the health insurance bill, I continue to stand firm in my stance that the bill should not pass, and if it does pass, it should be repealed. By continuing to hold this view even as most of my erstwhile allies fell in line to support a bill that they had, quite justly, likened to a pile of manure a few months ago, I have found myself in company with only a very select few who are ideologically similar to me. Most of those who oppose this thing are on the Republican side of the aisle. However, I’ve never been a fan of the sports team method of conducting politics. No, if the people who agree with me on the ultimate goal (even if they disagree on the reason for their stance) are mostly Republicans, well, so be it. I’m not picky. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but it can be my ally for now. A vote is a vote.

And the fact that most of those same erstwhile allies consider this such an atrocious thing says a great deal about their true priorities. In my not-so-humble opinion, these people are liars to pretend they care about some 30 million without insurance, or people with existing medical conditions (of whom I am one), or a hypothetical 45,000 people who may die a few years earlier than they otherwise would have (yes, it sounds inhuman, but life can be cruel. Many of that figure will die because of cancer. Insured or not, the 10-year survival rates for internal cancers generally are not good). For starters, the bill is an insurance coverage bill and outside of some provisions for community clinic funding, it has nothing to do with health care administered by medical professionals. The typical deductible and co-pays of affordable individual coverage policies—to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara—might as well be a million dollars if you don’t have that kind of money saved up, and most Americans, unfortunately, do not have that kind of money saved up. The bill doesn’t bring the individual market up to the standards of the group policy market in deductibles and co-pays, not even close.

Some of those lives could indeed be saved, but precious few of these activists are truly interested in saving lives. I can’t entirely fault them; it’s a known quirk of human nature that it is easier not to let death bother one if the numbers are high enough and the incident is remote or distributed enough. I see that 45,000 figure and I don’t even blink. Still, that’s not what I mean here. There are, undoubtedly, some long-term health care activists who see the world from an optimistic viewpoint and want to believe that this bill will help. I will not disdain them, though I think they are tragically mistaken, and nothing I say refers to them. However, most of the people yapping sanctimoniously about this on blogs, Facebook, and political mass e-mails are Johnny-come-latelys to the health care issue, and they are only on it right now because that is what their party and the president are on right now. These activists’ real agenda is only to maintain their partisan majority in Congress this year. They may use the 45,000 or 30 million as a loaded gun against their opponents, but if they get what they want, the devil take those human statistics. I have seen this disgusting little game played before; in 2006 many Democratic candidates invoked the Katrina response and the body count following it, but as I have complained about many a time and documented on this blog, most of them didn’t lift a finger to help those people after assuming office. I see no reason to believe it’ll be any different for the politicians or partisan activists when the true effects, or lack thereof, of their health insurance bill start to come out. Once this thing is over, they’ll move on to something else.

Incidentally, these partisan activists have revealed with their very own words just what they really think of the right of people with chronic medical conditions (like me) to have affordable health care, and it is not encouraging. Some proposals have been floated to initiate the pre-existing condition exclusions immediately but wait to implement any mandate. Such proposals would actually benefit the chronically ill (if they had all the loopholes plugged—keep reading!), you know. But whenever such an idea has been brought up, the partisan activist goons are on it like a pack of hyenas: “We can’t do that! We can’t have the pre-existing condition exclusions without an individual mandate! People might wait till they got sick to buy a policy and it would raise my premiums! Besides, there’s a high risk pool proposed for the interim!” (There are high risk pools already in place in many states. This does not make them affordable or useful for obtaining treatment for costly illnesses. If it did, we wouldn’t be discussing this.)

The proposals I refer to would affect a period of not quite four years, and even if people actually did drop their insurance en masse just because they could (which I do not believe would happen), the sky will not fall in four years, and health insurers could easily take the comparatively small losses out of their own profits rather than hiking everyone’s rates, if they were ordered to do so. Besides, even after the mandate would take place, people could still go naked as long as they paid the fine, which is much less costly than a policy, and these same people could still wait to get a policy… when they got sick. So much for that bogeyman. So no, this is not about fairness to the public at all. In the minds of partisan progressive activists, it’s more important to be “fair” to a parasitic industry that has killed its own customers by proxy than it is to provide health insurance to people who are sick. To them, I have no right to affordable health care; it is a privilege that depends on the behavior of other people. Concern for the chronically ill, my rear. I have so much contempt for the deceitful sanctimony of these people that I can barely express it, and though I do have chronic medical conditions and therefore would be among the people they pretend to care about, I will not be a pom-pom for their partisan cheerleading.

I have had the opinion for quite some time that the worst thing anyone could do, in the view of Democratic Party brass, is to display disloyalty to the party brand. There is no such thing to these people as ideological disloyalty. As I’ve lamented before, they discussed stripping Joe Lieberman of his chairmanship not because he thwarted an investigation into FEMA’s role in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but because he campaigned for John McCain. Now, we have numerous reports that the White House threatened to make sure that any Democrat who voted against the health insurance package would not receive any party money for re-election. There were no repercussions or threats made when the stimulus act passed last year, nor have there been any such threats for any other piece of legislation that the president wanted. Absolutely none. But it was never implied that the failure of these bills might result in a party changeover in the fall. Now that some people in the pundit and political classes have formed this opinion about this particular bill, opposing it is tantamount to switching party allegiance in their minds.

But to return to topic, my opposition to the bill. It is not just unmitigated contempt for many of the proponents (and pity for the rest, who I think are in for a big disappointment) that is why my opinion is what it is. I also have good reason to believe that the bill can make things much harder for people like me. Right now, if I were to receive a denial letter that said “pre-existing conditions,” I can produce paperwork demonstrating in an open-and-shut case that I am entitled to the insurance claim. I’ve done it before. I can handle my own appeals at minimal cost and time as long as the insurers can still say “pre-existing conditions.” If the bill passed and the regulations took effect in 2014, they wouldn’t be able to say that any longer. But don’t worry; they have a backup plan: They still can send out letters to customers rescinding coverage altogether if they claim it is on the basis of fraud, and to fight a fraud claim, you’ll have to engage legal services. For many, you’ll have to hire a lawyer and fight these vermin in court while you are sick and getting medical treatment. The insurers do this already to customers whom they cannot get on pre-existing conditions but who develop a costly illness that they don’t want to pay for, and insurance company executives have even told members of Congress point-blank that they would continue to do this to customers if the bill passed. Great, just great. Though I’m sure the trial lawyers’ lobby is quite happy.

Incidentally, when this detail is pointed out to these progressive activists that I have been impugning, they get quite upset and insist that such things won’t really happen because it will depend on how regulations are written up and interpreted. (The memories of the Bush Administration deliberately ignoring and defying all manner of business regulations, let alone “legitimately” interpreting them in the most corporate-friendly way possible, seem to have slipped their minds.) The naivete would be truly amazing if I believed it really were naivete; as I have said, though, I think the simple answer is that they do not really care about the chronically ill. They are liars.

I will not be the pawn of a group of people who are interested in my life only as a tool to achieve partisan triumphs. I’ve watched it happen once before, and all I got in return was disappointment and betrayal. Say what you will about the Republican activists; at least they make it plain that they don’t care three straws about people like me. If they decide that they would use us left-wing opponents for their own goals and then discard us, it’s no different from what the progressive activists and politicians would do—except that we can also use them.

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September 8, 2009

Making It $0.04, Then: Health Care Part II

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 5:44 pm

My previous blog about health care reform and Generation Y did not touch on one specific detail about the prospect of a mandates-only insurance law like the state of Massachusetts has. This follow-up will address that 800-pound gorilla and a bit more.

Let’s take the hypothetical that Congress passes, and the President signs, a bill that requires American adults to purchase a private insurance policy but does not provide a public plan. Let us suppose that noncompliance is punished with a fine that is automatically taken out of one’s taxes, as is done in MA. In that state, you must provide proof of insurance for the entire tax year or, barring extreme poverty, you will get fined for it.

Generations Y and Millennial, which contain the largest number of uninsured, will get hit the hardest by such a law. The bill that proposes this, the “Baucus bill,” would cap the out-of-pocket cost of premiums at 13% of a person’s yearly income. A year’s full-time work at the minimum wage (probably the most common wage for this age group) comes to $14,790 before taxes; you can skim off about 20 percent of that in various taxes, of which perhaps half will be recovered by the following year. (The rest is Social Security and Medicare. Yes, Virginia, there is socialized medicine in America already, but only if you’re older than 65.) I am not sure whether the 13% figure applies to gross income or income after taxes. If it is gross income, that’s $1922.70 a year for insurance premiums, or $160 a month. For net income, it is $1538.16 a year, or $128.18 a month.

This may not sound so bad until you realize that this leaves a single person making minimum wage with either $9909 a year or $10294 a year, and this must cover housing, food, transportation (including auto insurance in most cases), utilities, and perhaps other necessities such as child care. It also must cover all medical bills that this “insurance” is not covering because of deductibles and co-pays.

The only plans that run for less than $128 a month are plans that are not intended to be long-term. They are meant for people who are between jobs and need creditable coverage to avoid getting blasted with a pre-existing conditions clause when they get a job again. They often have expiration dates of a year after issuance. The kind of a plan a minimum-wage worker would afford gets them a ridiculously high deductible (up to $5000) and a horrible co-pay. This sort of policy is worthless. It’s extortion, quite frankly—forcing money out of a person to avoid a punishment, but not offering anything tangible to show for it. People with these policies pay twice; they pay for their premiums and then they pay for the cost of medical care, because the insurance doesn’t cover a bit of it unless they get catastrophically ill.

I defy anyone, anyone in the world other than Ebenezer Scrooge, to suggest that this is a reasonable thing to do to someone making minimum wage. In many cities, it is tantamount to condemning a person to living in a shelter. It encourages people to make very poor decisions in order to have enough household cash to stay out of cardboard boxes: Find a roommate, any roommate, cohabit and therefore risk an unplanned pregnancy, get married when they have no business doing so, etc. Some people will find ways of committing suicide (and decrease the surplus population?) rather than continue with what they believe is a never-ending downward spiral. Forcing vulnerable people into making bad decisions is not good policy.

However, even the most diehard Scrooges of the world surely will not have a word to say about the other horrible aspect of this hypothetical mandates-only insurance law. I am talking about deficit explosions. This is the 800-pound gorilla, the aspect of bad reform bills that I did not touch on in the previous blog. Deficits are popular to talk about these days, and it says something about the insurance industry’s stranglehold on our political system that deficits suddenly don’t get discussed when bills come up that could reap them a mountain of profit.

That 13 percent in the Baucus bill is not a cap on the market cost of a policy. It is a cap on the buyer’s out-of-pocket costs toward buying that policy. You cannot force people to pay money that they don’t have; debtor’s prisons are against the law and I think there might well be blood in the streets if we actually started sending people to jail for nonpayment of “fines” for not being insured. The government, you see, helps out. It makes up the difference by offering subsidies to poor people. There is no proposal to cap the absolute cost of policies, and there is no proposal to cap executive payrolls. Basically, there’s no means to control runaway health insurance costs. This bill, a national version of the failed Massachusetts system, would simply shift the bulk of the expense to the government.

You think the deficit is bad now? Wait till the government has locked itself into paying whatever insurance companies demand. This is what has happened in Massachusetts. I used to live there; the system that they have there has only exploded premium costs, with the state government paying the price for it. Much of the money is paying for garbage—the lousy junk (or more accurately, bunk) insurance policies that are all that’s affordable to private individuals without group coverage. The purpose of business is to make money. That’s neither evil nor good in itself, but it should be taken into account. Government policy telling a particular industry “Charge what you like and we’ll foot the bill” is blatantly stupid.

Sure enough, the most expensive Congressional bills, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, are those that attempt such a thing. The least expensive are those that have a sturdy cost control mechanism, namely a government-administered insurance option.

The main benefit of a public plan would be that NO money going to it would be funneled into the 8-figure salaries and bonuses that have actually driven the cost of health insurance premiums sky-high. It could pay for people’s health care rather than the yacht of some corporate bureaucrat. It is a complete myth that malpractice lawsuits, overuse of medical services, and/or a reckless iPhone-loving generation voluntarily going uninsured are what have caused costs to go up. All of these things undoubtedly happen on case-by-case bases, but the real culprit, pure and simple, is executive greed, just as it was for Wall Street.

A private-only reform plan could work, theoretically. Other countries have done it. However, the countries that have pulled it off have regulated their private sectors to the hilt. There are strong cost control mechanisms and in many cases, take-home pay is capped. I don’t think such a system would be the best fit for the United States of America. We are about choices in the marketplace. A government plan is just another choice. If it provides a better product than the private sector, well, that’s the marketplace at work. They would either improve themselves or take the consequences.

I do believe in economic freedom, provided that basic safety of labor, consumers, and the environment has been accounted for. Earlier in the year when people were screaming for Congress to cap executive pay, I was against the idea; I favored a punitive tax on firms that had abused the bailout money. I am against the government placing a cap on the pay of any private sector individual, including those most hated. All legitimate businesses get government assistance, whether in the form of tax benefits or in the much loathed bailouts. In many situations, government contracts jobs out to private businesses, paying them with taxpayer money. Saying “X business should have its salaries capped because it gets money from the government” is a slippery slope, and what the people calling for it actually wanted was a cap on “bad” businesses encoded into U.S. law. This is a bad idea. I am all for highly progressive taxes on the wealthy, but I am unequivocally against dictating a maximum limit for a person’s gross income.

So, a mandates-only bill will drive people who are barely treading water further into financial disintegration, most of whom are the young generation and are already saddled with mountains of debt and a truly atrocious economic situation. It will force them to create more credit card debt as they pile basic living expenses onto their cards out of sheer necessity. (Do you hear the voice of personal experience in this?) It will drive governments into a sea of red ink as they foot the bill for the remainder of whatever outrageously priced bunk insurance policy that the private sector, when guaranteed a captive customer base, will force on people. This is not theoretical, though the theoretical financial estimates of such a proposal back it up too. This has actually happened in the state, Massachusetts, where it has been tried.

There’s a call these days that “some reform is better than none at all.” I most vociferously disagree. There are ways of making the status quo worse, and the Congressional bill out there that does not have a public option definitely does that. It may be bad for the Democratic Party to fail to pass a bill, but the long-term fiscal health of the United States of America takes precedent over the health of a political party.

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September 6, 2009

My $0.02 on Health Care: Beware the Sleeping Giant

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 12:55 am

I’ve avoided saying anything on this blog about the health care debate, not because I don’t have an opinion, but because it seemed to vary on a daily basis about which way the debate was going, and anything I said would be obsolete very quickly unless I updated the blog each day as well (which I don’t have the requisite commitment to blogging to do).  This is likely to be my sole comment on it, and it is to serve as a warning to certain people in politics.

If you pass a health care reform bill that mandates all adult Americans to purchase insurance policies without providing a Medicare-like public option, beware.  Beware the sleeping giant.

I speak of Generation Y, the group of people born in the 1980s.  This is my generation.  It is the generation that, arguably, delivered Barack Obama the White House.  It is also the generation with the most people who are “voluntarily uninsured.”  (The “young invincibles,” as the sneering corporate media dubs us, a phrase that is extremely offensive to those of us in our 20s who do have serious pre-existing conditions, such as yours truly, and already have accepted that our bodies are on a time limit because we get proof of it at every doctor’s visit.)

Yes, of the voluntarily uninsured, a majority of them are young people who (for whatever reason) don’t think they need health insurance yet.  This is true.  This means that my generation has become a convenient scapegoat for those forces who think that the problem is that things cost too much for the insurance industry.  We (I say “we” to refer to Generation Y as a whole, since I am obviously not part of the “we” who can voluntarily forgo health insurance) are blamed for the rise in premiums, since we aren’t there to share the costs with everyone else.  The fact that the health insurance industry has raked in record profits lately seems to have escaped the minds of these people, but there you have it.  A mandate from the government to buy insurance would hit my generation the hardest.

And let me tell you, the Democratic Party will not like the result.  In all the calculations by the White House and the Blue Dog members (not least of which appear to be calculations about how much money they will lose from the industry in donations if they support real reform), the effect of waking up the sleeping giant of Generation Y and its successor, the Millennials, seems to have been lost.

My generation put these Democrats and this President into power.  I have to admit that I was never on board with hope and change; I was always skeptical and cynical about that rhetoric.  But many of my generation actually did believe it.  More importantly, they believed in it. They saw candidate Obama as a person who was in touch with them and could actually represent them. I can say with near certainty that forcing this generation to send their money to the bloodsucking private insurance industry, in exchange for junk policies (which is all that will be offered at the rates that Generation Y can actually afford—keep reading), will drive these new voters into cynical apathy or possibly even into the arms of the Republican Party.

The AFL-CIO recently completed a report on the economic state of young workers.  Their findings were that my generation (and to an extent, Generation X) can barely afford their bills, if at all; that a third of us still live with parents because of necessity; that if we lost our sources of income, a huge majority of us would have no more than a month’s worth of living expenses saved up; and that we have the worst health benefits, sick/vacation packages, and retirement benefits of any age group.

THIS is the generation that the Democrats in Congress and apparently, the President, would force to enrich the health insurance industry.  Generation Y cannot afford it. However much CNN and its ilk may want to pretend that my age cohort has a large number of uninsured because we would rather pay out for iPods, the truth is that we don’t have it because a great many of us have crappy jobs (if any) with crappy wages and worse, no benefits.  I am exceedingly grateful to be in the portion of my generation that does have at least mediocre health insurance that covers my pre-existing conditions and a deductible that wouldn’t require me to tap into the cash line of my credit card to pay.

If we get a mandates-only health insurance bill out of Washington, where is the money going to come from to pay for the premiums, I ask?  Government subsidies?  Try getting government subsidies as a young person unless you are a single parent or living in a box.  I’ve tried.  The proposed subsidy program in one of the many health care bills, the one that does not have a public option, is about at this level.

Will it be like in Massachusetts, where you must provide proof of insurance to the state tax commission come tax day, and if you cannot provide it for all 12 months, you get a fine automatically taken out of your rebate?  That’ll go over well.  What if such a law would mean that a tax rebate became a tax liability, a liability that one could not pay?  Are we going to put people in jail for failure to send money to a private industry?  The Republican town hall disruptors scream about “fascism,” but if that’s not actual fascism, I don’t know what is.  If this is what we end up getting, you can toss me a tea bag and count me as one of them.  I strongly suspect I will not be the only liberal-turned-”teabagger” if this is what passes.

Incidentally, the cost of insurance premiums in Massachusetts has shot through the roof since “Romneycare” was enacted.  So much for mandates alone being an effective way to lower costs.

If the Democrats pass Romneycare-turned-national, they will lose Generation Y and the Millennials.

Obama’s going to make a statement on Wednesday about his vision for health care reform.  About time.  I hope he’s taken to heart the lesson that there are few real leaders in Washington, DC, and that Congress is used to 8 years of being threatened and intimidated by a consummate bully of a President to the extent that they have apparently forgotten how to lead.

A mandates-only bill is what I am against.  What I am for is a little harder to articulate.

I am in favor of a public health care option that is administered like Medicare—something that every American would be eligible for but that was not mandated and did not have automatic enrollment.

Call be a libertarian, but I am not in favor of “universal coverage” in the sense that 100% of the population would have “insurance” (whether public or private).  I think that if you are an adult, you have comprehensive and affordable options available to you, and you don’t want coverage, that should be your right—as should paying your own medical bills.  I am in favor of making good insurance affordable to everyone who wants it, and to all children regardless of what their parents want.

I am against caps on malpractice settlements.  What’s your eyesight worth to you?  What about your limbs?  What about the life of a loved one?  You see the problem with this.

I am in favor of passing a law allowing people to sue their health insurance providers.

I am in favor of having a strong federal committee to regulate the private insurance industry, but I am concerned about it becoming corrupted whenever a President or a Congress came in that didn’t want the insurance industry regulated.  Any means of making this committee robust rather than subject to the partisan whims of the time, I would be in favor of.

I am in favor of decoupling health insurance from employment.  If employers want to offer a group policy, that’s fine, but I do not support automatic enrollment of employees.

And with the exception of my tort reform opinion, I don’t see what’s so controversial about any of this.  But then, I’m not taking in thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

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February 21, 2009

Maybe Someone Got the Message?

Filed under: Katrina — PolitiCalypso @ 12:03 am

I do not harbor any delusions of grandeur, but I find it highly interesting—maybe even hopeful—that a day after I wrote a long tirade bashing Congressional Democrats for turning their backs on Hurricane Katrina survivors, President Obama steps up and takes some steps toward getting the Gulf Coast back on track. I have not been happy with everything that he has done since being inaugurated (let alone being elected—I do not like Hillary Clinton even now), but if he follows through on this, it will be a good thing.

President Barack Obama said Friday that residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast still are trying to rebuild three years after Hurricane Katrina and have not received the support they deserve from Washington.

[...]

“The residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast who are helping rebuild are heroes who believe in their communities and they are succeeding despite the fact that they have not always received the support they deserve from the federal government,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “We must ensure that the failures of the past are never repeated.”

Nice talk, certainly. We all know that he has a way with words. But it looks as though this is being followed up with some action, a rarity for a politician:

To provide more support, Mr. Obama said he would extend the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding, a position created by Bush that was set to expire at the end of this month, until September.

This is also a good thought. I am unsure exactly what is the chain of command for dispersing the earmarked recovery money that is “tied up” and “bogged down,” but if this Federal Coordinator has any say over it, he or she needs to get the process moving. The fact that the extension was only till September gives me some hope that perhaps this person really will kick some bureaucratic butts; as federal positions go, that’s not much of an extension!

Moreover, the President acknowledges that the Gulf Coast is still in rebuilding mode (something that the general public does/did not realize), and he must understand the point I was trying to make yesterday—namely, that the economic stimulus money will not be especially useful in an area that is still recovering from a catastrophic natural disaster, and that no useful public works projects can be started with this money until the Katrina recovery process is well underway (if not completed) because such projects would depend on what was planned out for the hurricane recovery.

There is a part of me that is skeptical, of course. Gulf state residents have been burned before, which was of course the subject of my last post. I will certainly be keeping a close eye on this, all things considered. But I consider it a good sign that, in a situation where he really has nothing politically to gain from it (the nation as a whole does not care, the MS coast is Republican, and Louisiana is trending GOP because of the migration from New Orleans) and in which the area’s own Congressional representatives were not especially concerned about the situation, he makes a point of speaking about it anyway. Dare I hope that, even though the Congresspeople were not concerned about the bogging down of earmarked funds and the futility of economic stimulus in those conditions, he was given the bad news about the stimulus act and decided it was unacceptable for the Gulf recovery to be left out?

If this process really does get moving quickly and the interminable paper-shuffling with regards to the earmarked Katrina money is ended, then the future of the coast is brighter than it appeared to me yesterday.

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September 28, 2008

The Corporate Betrayal

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 4:02 pm

Some of us saw this coming. Those of us who saw “trickle-down economics” for what it was, a colossal scam designed to funnel money from the have-nots to the haves. Those of us who realized that the price of goods could not continue to skyrocket out of control without a corresponding spike in wages. Those of us who saw that the housing bubble was just that, a bubble, brought on by absurdly low interest rates and a borderline-criminal group of marketers convincing people that (1) rates will always be this low, (2) the market will always be hot, and (3) credit is just as good as hard money.

I am a former Objectivist turned into a borderline market socialist, and I guess it really is the converts who are the most vocally opposed to their former beliefs. I have been wondering for five or six years when the crash would hit, the one that would destroy the cult of deregulation and voodoo economics. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting it to hit this soon, but I knew it was coming at some point. (Read more…)

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April 13, 2008

Speaking the Truth

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 2:28 pm

Barack Obama is a rarity in Washington — an honest politician who tells it like it is. Unfortunately the truth is often painful, as it was when he made the statement to a group of supporters that many working-class voters have been manipulated and used. The manufactured outrage from John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and much of the TV media has been utterly predictable and utterly self-serving, because all of these people know that Obama speaks the truth.

For years, decades in many areas, hard-working Americans have seen their jobs eliminated or shipped overseas for no reason other than the greed of CEOs and corporate boards. It may be called “good economics” or “cutting business costs,” but what it amounts to is greed. If they claim it is to make a product more affordable to consumers, this is also obfuscation, because consumers are forced to buy sweatshop products only when their own wages are stagnant (or falling). This is exactly what is going on now; regular Americans like you and me are unable to stave off a recession because we cannot afford to.

The Republican Party has long invoked the old specter of communism, convincing people that there is a government-sanctioned redistribution of wealth from the top down. This could not be farther from the truth: For years, the redistribution of wealth has been from the middle and working class into the pockets of multimillionaires. It’s been done with our nation’s economic policies, which tax work and reward wealth. It’s been done with the out-of-control cost hikes in healthcare, which have not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in people’s wages. And it’s been done in the war in Iraq, which has seen billions of our tax dollars taken from our paychecks and deposited into the coffers of Blackwater and Halliburton.

People do become bitter when they see everything they ever worked for taken away. But rather than make elections about the real cause of that anger, Republicans and a fair number of Democrats have been playing games with everyone, stirring up unfounded fears that the government will seize guns from law-abiding Americans or outlaw religion. It is a very smart tactic. It was no mere chance that freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right to self-defense were the very first amendments to our Constitution; these liberties are important to Americans and a perceived threat to them would stir up outrage.

But there is no such threat. The years-long campaign to convince people otherwise has been to give massive coverage to local stories where individual people illegally abused their power, and pretend that it is a formal government policy. It stirs up that outrage and distracts people from the real issue. Can you go to church? Can you talk about God to someone in the mall? Can you keep a gun in your house? Why, yes, and there is no danger that you will be denied these rights. However, there is a very real danger that you could lose your job, and with that, your healthcare, your life savings, your property, and even your house. The government won’t help you, either, despite that you have paid taxes all your life and been an honest American. They will bail out Bear Stearns, but you’re not important enough, in their minds.

THIS is what Barack Obama was referring to. HE is not the elitist. HE is not the one who looks down on voters. To the contrary, Barack Obama wants to address nationwide, systemic, real problems, not fearmongering and lies. Those who are on TV blathering about what Obama said have too much invested in the system to offer a fair assessment of his words. However, the voters have the opportunity to stand with a truly straight-talking politician and prove to the naysayers that they will not have their intelligence insulted and will not be lied to anymore.

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February 19, 2008

Come Hill or High Water

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 7:46 am

I’ve avoided blogging for a long time, in part because of some personal issues that have rather soured me on politics, but also because my chosen candidate, John Edwards, wasn’t making the splash I’d hoped he would, and I was actively against Hillary Clinton and indifferent to Barack Obama. I’m all in favor of the “hope-driven Obama nation” and political optimism, but I couldn’t identify with it personally, having been the victim of a blame-shifting opportunist (who, perhaps not coincidentally, ended up supporting Clinton) and becoming rather sour about the general ethics of those in politics. There was nothing, basically, to spark my interest in the primary season.

However, I’ve become so utterly disgusted with the Clinton operation that I’m going to break my silence.

In my opinion, Hillary Clinton is a craven, amoral politician who will do ANYTHING to “win.”

There. I said it.
I’m not talking about Bill Clinton’s racial remarks. I’m not talking about the smear campaign against Obama’s real estate deal, a smear that has since been thoroughly debunked. What I am talking about actually has nothing to do with Barack Obama, though I admit I am rooting for him because he is the only candidate in the race whose views I can stomach and who has a shred of integrity.

I’m not even talking about Hillary’s backstabbing of John Kerry in 2006 when she sided with the Rove noise machine about his ill-delivered joke. Though that incident DOES still rankle. Nor am I talking about the 2004 Election Night backstabbing of the Kerry-Edwards campaign by Clinton crony James Carville, who tipped off the Bush campaign about K/E’s intention to contest Ohio, resulting in lord only knows what ballot-shredding and other machinations that night, but which cleared the way for Hillary to run for office.

I’m talking about HillaryLand’s clear and open contempt for the democratic (and Democratic) process.

It started with her lawsuit in Nevada to prevent easy availability of polling places to casino workers, a demographic group that she apparently felt would not support her. The Clintons lost that suit and ended up winning Nevada anyway, but the point stands: If Hillary thinks you might not support her, she won’t support your right to vote.

Then came her sideswipes at those states that did not vote for her. “They’re just caucus states.” “Those are red states that we won’t win.” (Well, maybe not, but ceding them up front guarantees it.) “Those states have a lot of black voters.” “My opponent’s support was in the upper-middle-class, elite voters.” “The support comes from activists, who don’t represent the electorate.” Hillary denigrated all these groups of voters, making increasingly pitiful and offensive excuses for why she lost, rather than showing one iota of grace.

Then we witnessed her new strategy, which was to persuade party insiders (superdelegates) to vote for her at the Democratic convention, even if such a vote defied the will of the electorate.

Then she did a backflip on her stance on the Florida and Michigan delegates, and decided that those tainted elections should be just as valid as any other primary, because it would mean a delegate gain for her. Now, I’m as annoyed as anyone over the whole mess with those states, but that does not change the fact that they were not valid primaries. The issue is not with who was on the ballot and who wasn’t, or who campaigned and who didn’t. The issue is that the states’ voters were told that any vote they cast for the Democratic primary would not count, and now Hillary Clinton wants to change that, after any number of voters may have stayed home. It’s like a teacher telling a class, “I’m giving a practice test tomorrow. It won’t count for anything. Take it seriously if you like, but no one’s grade will be recorded”… and then, after the test is scored, counting it ANYWAY. It’s unethical.

Then, as if that isn’t enough, we have this. Welcome to the gutter, Hillary. That’s a sure way to endear people to you, strong-arm the delegates who are SUPPOSED to vote as their constituents voted.

Is there anything she won’t do?

At this point I would only be shocked to flip on my TV in August and see Hillary curled up in the fetal position at the Democratic convention, threatening to hold her breath until she is declared the nominee. And if she keeps up with these election-thieving plans, I wouldn’t even be surprised by THAT.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, if you’re clearly losing the nomination and have no respectable way of winning it, then show some dignity and drop out. Because not doing so only improves McCain’s chances of taking the White House. This is bigger, much bigger, than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Between a war, a recession, a government teetering on the edge of becoming autocratic, and the Bill of Rights itself at stake, we need someone who promises NEW policies, not four more years of the very stuff that got us here in the first place.

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February 13, 2007

Right-wing Group Continues Attack on Edwards. Will Dems Defend Him?

Filed under: Politics — PolitiCalypso @ 11:21 am

Embattled John Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte resigned, despite being told by the campaign that she was welcome to remain as a blogging consultant. I don’t particularly blame her; she probably felt that the best thing to do was to remove herself from the auspices of the official campaign, because her effectiveness as a supportive voice had been reduced dramatically.

You thought that would discourage the “religious” group that started all this in the first place? Think again.

They’ve sent letters to the other two front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (warning: both links are PDF), to condemn the bloggers (and, implicitly, the Edwards campaign itself). Some samples:

By taking up this issue publicly, you will be able to distinguish your candidacy from Mr. Edwards[...].

They [a professor and a member of a think tank] believe that Mr. Edwards mishandled this attack on Catholics and Christians, and by permitting Marcotte and McEwan to remain on his staff, it has harmed efforts aimed at building coalitions between Christians, Catholics, and Democrats.

On blogs, there is a term for this: concern trolling. It’s when a complete outsider, often (usually) opposed to the person or group’s aims in the first place, comes forward and expresses concern that some action a person or group took will harm those aims. It’s pure psyops, intended to create self-doubt and weakness among the ranks.

This group, known as Fidelis America, self-identifies as a Republican/Conservative political action committee. Here are the contributions that they made for the past election cycle, from disclosure database Open Secrets:

2006 Cycle:
Burns, Conrad (R-MT) – $100
Ensign, John (R-NV) – $100
Kyl, Jon (R-AZ) – $100
Santorum, Rick (R-PA) – $5,100
Talent, James M (R-MO) – $100
Total to Democratic Senate Candidates: $0
Total to Republican Senate Candidates: $5,500

And Democrats should cater to the demands of this group why, exactly?

These people will not endorse Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In all likelihood, they’ll endorse Sam Brownback. This is the Religious Right. Democrats have absolutely no obligation nor responsibility to condemn other Democrats at the urging of this group. The group donates to Republicans and does not care one bit about coalitions between Christians and Democrats. It probably shrinks in horror at the thought of the Religious Left becoming a force in politics. The purpose of this action is to create division and doubt among party ranks.

However, the right wing has sensed that the party tends to conduct itself this way — attack each other out of sheer terror. They did it to John Kerry last year in the face of a right-wing onslaught (although, to their credit, Edwards and Obama did not join in the attack — unfortunately, Clinton did). This behavior gives the right wing encouragement to continue with their attacks.

I sincerely hope that the other two front-runners repudiate this.

(Hat tip to Kagro X of the Daily Kos for the blog piece inspiring this entry.)

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