It’s going to be interesting to see how the Obama administration responds to the unfolding oil spill disaster in the Gulf. This is Katrina all over again, but this time there is absolutely no doubt that the tragedy is man-made and could absolutely have been avoided. BP America is 100% at fault here, as guilty as it gets. Not only should they be paying for every single dime that it costs to contain and repair the damage done, they should also be held responsible for reimbursing every single American who will end up being financially impacted by the disaster. If this bankrupts BP, so be it. They have it coming. And let’s not let the lawyers get involved here. If there’s the slightest hesitancy on BP’s part to pony up to every last fisherman and small businessman affected, then the government should not hesitate to seize every asset of BP America and use those assets to make right by everyone who ends up harmed by the spill. And if that’s still not enough, go after the rest of the oil industry. They are all culpable here, lying and misleading the American public about the risks involved in offshore drilling, and doing everything they can to minimize their costs (and thus maximize their profits).
In fact, this is the Wall Street fiasco all over again as well, with bankers making incredibly risky bets in order to maximize their profits, knowing all along that if the risky bets failed, the financial burden wouldn’t fall on them. It’s the same thing with the oil companies — to hell with what might happen if something goes wrong, not their problem. Just maximize the profits, and if hundreds of thousands of innocent people have their lives ruined in the process, well it’s no skin off their backs.
You have to wonder if maybe this will be the lesson where it gets through the thick skull of the average American that big corporations are not their friends? That these corporations have no respect for the average American, and that is exactly why you need a strong government with strong regulation in place in order to keep the monsters from continually wrecking the lives of We The People. For the past 30 years or more, corporations have been running the government and running all over the rights and lives of Americans. It’s high time to take the country back and put these corporate monsters under strict laws and regulations so that disasters like the banking crisis and now this oil spill never happen again.
In watching this week’s hysterical response to the health care reform legislation by the Republican Party, it occurs to me that the old defining line of liberals vs. conservatives is no longer relevant. Conservatives would have you believe that this legislation is extreme liberalism at it’s worse, many equating it to the dreaded socialism. But the reality is that what ended up being passed by Congress very closely resembles the proposals of the Republican Party back during the Clinton administration, and in fact is very similar to the Massachusetts plan which was endorsed by then Governor and now Republican Presidential Candidate-Wanna-Be Mitt Romney. Indeed, that stalwart Republican Richard Nixon proposed a plan back in 1974 that looked a lot like what ended up being passed by the Democrats. So this whole idea that the bill is anywhere close to being “liberal” is hogwash at face value.
It seems to me that there was a time, back 30 years ago, when liberal-conservative differences had to do with different ways of achieving the same ends. Ultimately, both Republicans and Democrats wanted what was best for the country, what was best for all Americans, and what would continue to make America a better place for future generations. But somewhere along the line, the Republican Party lost interest in this idea of the “common good” and started catering strictly to the selfish and the greedy who cared not a damn about anything other than their own personal needs. The attitude was “I’m happy with my health care so there’s no need to change things at all — if you don’t have health care that’s your problem, not mine”. It’s the same with climate change legislation — it might (and that’s even doubtful) hinder today’s profits in order to insure a better America in the future, so to hell with it, it’s just another “socialist plot”. I want my money and I want it now. If climate change does turn out to be a major issue for future generations, then that’s their problem, not ours. And so it goes with every major issue the country faces today — for today’s Republicans, unless it directly benefits them today, they aren’t going to support it.
In retrospect, I think you can trace all this back to Ronald Reagan in 1980 when his campaign motto was “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Notice the adjective “you” — it wasn’t “are WE as a nation better off”, it was strictly a personal perspective. That’s when the Republican Party stopped caring about the country as a whole, and started catering to select groups of self-centered people — the greedy rich who care only about their personal wealth, the religious right who care only about forcing their religious values on everyone, and the racists and bigots who care only about making sure that non-whites are kept in their place. And so the party has evolved into a coalition of two-year olds who can think of no one but themselves, and anytime they don’t get exactly what they want all they can do is throw temper tantrums like we saw last week.
At long last we finally have some type of health care reform. And that’s both good news and bad news. Good news in that at least something has been done. But bad news in that this was a very bad piece of legislation and really does very little to address the real problem, which is a terribly broken privatized system. As the rest of the developed world has known for a long time, the only way to provide decent health care to all citizens is through some type of public option. And ultimately that’s where we have to end up. Private insurance companies make their profits by NOT providing health care. Every time they pay a claim, that cuts in to their profits, so clearly that’s something they want to avoid doing. What could be more obvious than that?
So the real question is where do we go from here? Will this work as a starting point to begin introducing true regulation of the insurance industry, and will it ultimately evolve in to a system with a public option? Or will the issue now fade from the national agenda, so that nothing really changes and we become a nation where only the very wealthy can afford any kind of decent health care?
Last Friday on “Real Time With Bill Maher” Dennis Kucinich gave a great summary of where we stand on true reform. I was glad to see Kucinich finally come around in the end to voting for the bill, as I agreed 100% with everything he had said in opposition to the bill, and yet I also agreed with everyone who said that something had to be passed regardless of how bad it was, just to get the ball rolling.
Kucinich’s remarks on privatization are right on target. You know, it’s a shame Dennis isn’t more “charismatic”, or whatever it is that is required these days for one to be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, as it’s his type of compassion and intelligence that are so desperately needed in the White House if this country is ever going to become the great nation it used to be.
If there was any doubt that the U.S. Senate is broken beyond repair, Sen. Jim Bunning removed all doubt last week when his one-man crusade against the unemployed caused some 400,000 to lose their unemployment benefits during one of the worst economic periods in the history of the country. As has been noted in many places, Bunning’s action made absolutely no sense at all for any number of reasons. This is one move that you can’t even chalk up to plain old stupidity or good old fashioned right-wing self-centeredness. The only explanation here is that this guy is just bat-shit crazy.
Clearly something needs to be done to fix the Senate — it’s one thing to be “protecting the rights of the minority” with some of the weird rules of the Senate, but one-man stands like this certainly have to be done away with. But what about this silly “60 vote super-majority” that is apparently needed to pass anything of substance in the Senate? I can understand how this concept might have made some sense back in the good old days when there were only 13 states and thus 26 Senators, and I’m guessing there wasn’t all that much difference in the population of the various states. But these days when you have over 50% of the population living in just 10 states, how much sense does it make that in the Senate the smaller 40 states have the exact same representation as the most populous states? Even if you did away with this 60-vote requirement, you would still have an incredibly skewed representation in the Senate.
Right now you hear a lot of progressives bemoaning the Senate rules and calling for wholesale changes. But the obvious problem is what happens when the pendulum inevitably swings back to the conservatives — and progressives need these rules to prevent the Sen. Bunnings of the world from totally destroying the country. Just look at the disaster that the 8-year Bush administration was — what would that have been like with relaxed rules in the Republican controlled Senate in Bush’s first six years? You think things are bad now, at least the country is still standing. And given the wholesale stupidity of so many Americans, combined with the greed and selfishness of American conservatives these days, perhaps these silly Senate rules that protect us from ourselves are indeed wise.
Although these comments from the right-wing media about health care reform are clearly disgusting, at the same time they are rather refreshing as well. At least they are being honest about what their real concerns are in the HCR debate. After all the back and forth of the last year with the obfuscation and outright lies from the Republican Party, at long last they are coming clean. What it comes down to is that they don’t give a rat’s ass about anything other than their own personal needs. We live in the richest country in the world, and yet our health care system is one of the worst in the world, comparable only to the likes of Mexico and Turkey. But that’s OK by these right-wingers — 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance, and they couldn’t care less. How’s that for good old compassionate conservatism?
And then there’s all the hatred emanating from last week’s CPAC meeting. Here’s one of these idiots applauding an alleged incident of spousal abuse, and here they are showing their love of torture. But the star of the show had to be this Republican Congressman actually making a hero of the terrorist who flew a plane in to the IRS building in Austin.
The people who make up Idiot Nation are a big enough problem on their own — but these are examples that go far beyond plain old stupidity. These are vile, contemptible people who can’t use stupidity as an excuse. And hopefully as they keep opening their mouths and removing all doubt about just how despicable they are, the majority of Americans will see them for what they truly are.
On those rare occasions when Tiger Woods fails to make the cut at a major golf tournament, do you see headlines proclaiming that Woods really isn’t a very good golfer at all, and the idea that he is one of the best to ever play the game is just one big conspiracy? Of course not. Everyone realizes that when he plays poorly that’s the exception to the rule — because the overwhelming evidence over the years is that he is indeed one of the best golfers ever. This seems oh so painfully straight forward.
But then we have this week’s snow storm that blanketed much of the U.S. with record snowfall — another obvious exception to the rule — and yet the flat-earthers are screaming about how this disproves the theory of global warming. This is so patently absurd at face value — and yet our esteemed news media are reporting this with all seriousness. And they wonder why their business model is falling apart? Why aren’t these flat-earthers being mocked in the headlines as the morons they are?
And what makes this even more absurd is that this is just more evidence of ultimately what global warming is all about. “Global warming” is just the symptom — the end result is “climate change”. And record snow is a perfect example of this — record warm temperatures one month followed by record snow the next month. That’s what I would call pretty extreme “climate change”. In fact, where is all the reporting of what is going on right now in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics? A place that normally has huge amounts of snow has no snow at all! Here again, another example of “climate change” in the extreme.
So the real story here is that current weather news is just continuing to confirm everything we know about global warming and climate change. But instead, the news headlines are dominated by the flat-earthers.
John McCain is by far and away the saddest story in politics over the last 20 years. Although virtually all Republicans these days are douche bags and have been douche bags all their lives, McCain is the exception — at one point he was actually a decent man. He was one of the last of the “Goldwater conservatives”, people that you could disagree with but at least see the point of their arguments, and with whom you could work to make this country and this world a better place for all people.
But alas, those days are long gone. How pitiful was this exchange between McCain and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen? Not only is McCain doing a total flip-flop on the issue, he’s belittling all the top leaders of our military. There’s no longer any resemblance at all between the John McCain we see today and the one that ran for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1999. I’m embarrassed for him every time I see him on the news these days. Hopefully the people of Arizona will vote him out of office this year and we won’t have to watch this tragedy anymore.
There are so many things wrong about this proposed “spending freeze” it’s hard to know where to start. First off, it never works as long as you have over 50% of the federal budget going to the military, with an additional $130 billion plus going to wars in the Mideast. The only way to make a significant reduction in the budget is to cut military expenditures, and we all know that ain’t going to happen. Second off, we’re still very much in a severe recession with mass unemployment. Spending freezes are only going to aggravate that situation. If you don’t believe me, ask the ghost of Herbert Hoover. Third, if what you are trying to do here is placate the right-wing whack jobs, that’s nonsense. None of them really give a shit about the deficit — Reagan, Bush I and Bush II all ran up huge deficits and you didn’t hear a peep out of them then. And Clinton actually balanced the budget and decreased the deficit — and for that, the right-wingers impeached him! So if you think conservatives actually care about the deficit, you are indeed an idiot.
And probably what’s most absurd about this whole idea is that if you really, really want to do something about the deficit there is one very easy, very obvious solution. You raise taxes! And you can easily do that without effecting over 98% of the population! Just raise the marginal tax rate on the richest Americans — hell, if you are making over $250,000 per year you’ve got more money than you can possibly spend anyway. At the very least, do away with the Bush welfare-for-the-rich tax cuts. Or hell, conservatives worship at the altar of Ronald Reagan, so why not take the marginal rate back to that golden age when it was 50%? How can any Reaganomics fan oppose that? Or if you really are serious about reducing the deficit, why not revert back to the 70% marginal rate for the wealthiest Americans that was in place during the good old days of LBJ? I for one was around back then, and I can guarantee you that the rich folks weren’t suffering at all with that rate. In fact, they were doing just as well as they are today, just maybe without quite the degree of ostentatiousness we see these days.
Once again, it’s hard to figure out what Obama is really up to here. He’s clearly smart enough to know all the above, so what’s the real strategy? Ultimately the economy has to improve quickly, or we’ll be back to the old failed policies of the Republicans, which will put the country right back into the death spiral it was in when Obama took office. And this policy in no way does anything for the economy, and in fact runs a high risk of just making things worse. With the midterm elections looming this year, time is starting to run out for Obama.
It’s been one full year since Barack Obama has been in the White House, and that’s enough time to at least make an interim assessment of how he’s doing. There is a big caveat, though — for the Presidency interim grades really don’t matter, it’s only the final grade that counts. And he still has three more years before that grade gets issued. Obama is an incredibly smart and knowledgeable individual — certainly far more so than I and 99.9% of the rest of the population are. So to think he didn’t anticipate much of what has transpired over his first year, and that he doesn’t have some grand, four-year plan that easily adapts to all this — well, that’s probably folly.
Regardless, though, it has been a rough and rocky first year. Ironically it was George Bush who infamously campaigned on the theme that he was a “uniter not a divider”, but then promptly proceeded to divide this country to an extent it hadn’t seen since the Civil War. And conversely, it was Barack Obama who campaigned on a theme of “change we can believe in”, but at least so far has pretty much ended up with nothing changed at all due mainly to his efforts to be a “uniter not a divider”.
If you read Obama’s Audacity Of Hope you could have easily seen all this coming. In fact, this is exactly why I preferred Hillary Clinton in the primaries. For anyone with an IQ higher than that of a rutabaga, it was clear that the Republican Party had become morally bankrupt and their mission was to re-make the country as some type of authoritarian government run by the wealthy and big corporations. The only way to fix what transpired during the Bush administration was to come in and kick butt and take no prisoners. These people were clearly swine that you could not work with. And Hillary not only seemed to understand that, but also gave the impression that’s exactly what she would do.
But alas, the oft-spineless Democrats went in the other direction with Obama. When he took office, he had a couple of excellent opportunities to lay down the law pretty quickly. First there was the Wall Street meltdown, which cried out for the temporary nationalization of the banks — something that many leading economists endorsed. But instead of taking charge, he ended up simply bailing out the banks and pretty much kowtowing to their every demand. And so here we are one year later, with the economy still reeling and nothing having been done to fix it. The other issue where he could have really established himself was what to do about Guantanamo prison and the torturing of prisoners that happened way too often under Bush-Cheney. Many people were urging him to appoint a special prosecutor to look in to all the criminal acts of the Bush administration. That would have sent a clear message to Americans and the rest of the world that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, and when even the President and Vice-President blatantly break the law, they will be held accountable. But alas, Obama caved in on that issue — Bush, Cheney, et al were allowed to get away scot free, and even Gitmo is still open for business.
So here we are one year later, with Obama under attack from both the left and the right. Will he continue to try to be the “uniter” and work both sides of the street, or has he learned his lesson that you simply can not work with these monsters on the right? That’s certainly the big question for the coming year.
Now it does occur to me that ironically he can possibly turn the clock back a year, and maybe use those same two issues on which he caved on a year ago to establish himself as a kick-ass President. The banking crisis really hasn’t gone away at all — it’s just been festering and growing uglier. We are no longer on the brink of an economic meltdown, so actually nationalizing the banks probably isn’t feasible. But pushing through legislation that would strictly regulate the industry, plus do something to bust up the big banks and restore some level of competition to the industry so that no one bank could again become “too big to fail” would go a long ways towards fixing the problem and establishing himself as being an advocate for “we the people” and not being yet another corporate pawn. And the issue of torture and high crimes has yet again re-surfaced, so here’s a golden opportunity to appoint that special prosecutor and at last start a serious investigation in to all the criminal acts of the previous administration. By doing so he would restore this country as indeed the law-abiding democracy that it once was, and put the right wing on notice that their attempts to destroy that democracy will not be tolerated.
Will Obama at last get tough? Not much has been accomplished in his first year, but maybe — just maybe — he’s seen how disgusting and vile the opposition is, and he’ll spend the next three years indeed kicking butt and taking no prisoners. Let’s hope so.
Did I just say we were “on track” to becoming a banana republic? Oops. Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, I think it’s pretty safe to say that we have now arrived in banana republic land. As of this ruling, the United states is no longer a democracy. That’s not an over the top reaction, that’s now a fact of life in the U.S. Every government position from President of the U.S. to the local city council is now up for sale to whatever corporation antes up the most money. “We the people” — the “demo” in “democracy” — no longer have any say whatsoever in the government that sets the laws and determines what we can and cannot do. We are now officially a corporatocracy. Our corporate overlords will now dictate — yes “dictate” as in dictatorship — exactly what we the people can and can not do.
But hey, look on the bright side. There’s no longer any reason to worry about health care reform — might as well ditch the current bill that is in Congress. Whatever might get passed will get overturned anyway within two election cycles when Big Pharma and the health insurance industry buy out Congress and the White House. You think health care is expensive today? Five years from now if you aren’t in the top quarter income bracket you won’t have any health care at all! And what about clean energy? Again, within a couple of election cycles Big Oil will also own enough congressional reps that whatever might get passed will be thrown out. You think $4/gallon gas was bad? With Big Oil controlling the government, you’ll be lucky to find gas at twice that price. And regulation of Wall Street? Forget about it — soon enough Bank of America and Goldman Sachs will be doing whatever they want without any constraints at all. You think 10% unemployment is bad? With an economy dictated by Wall Street, 25% unemployment will be the standard. What you now see in Detroit will become the norm for all American cities when these guys take over the economy. If you don’t make a quarter million a year, you have no worth to them. It’s the new feudalism, and you’re a peasant.
