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Where's My Monkey Wrench?

By Steve Hynd

A couple of days ago,  Chris Bowers snarkily announced his conversion to being a "conservative Democrat".

After several years of trying to "retake" the Democratic Party and make it more progressive, today I am giving up and becoming a conservative Democrat. Upon careful consideration, the benefits packages are simply too heavily tilted toward the corporate wing of the party. Check it out:

It would be pretty sweet to be able to endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes to keep me in the Party. I mean, if you do this as a progressive, then you are pretty much screwed for life.

...If you are a conservative Democrat, you get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own. If you are a progressive, you have to stand at the back of the line, and then get threats about never hearing from the White House again if you step out of line.

Further, if you are a conservative Democrat, you can also refuse to pay your Democratic Party Committee dues, and still receive disproportionate expenditures from Democratic Party Committees. That is just a straight up good deal.

...Being a conservative Democrat gets you more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors. Hard to argue with receiving both enormous big dollar fundraisers held in your honor and huge amounts of money from small progressive donors. So really, who cares if bloggers complain about you. Their readers are still going to fork over huge amounts of money.

If you are a conservative Democrat, you get to hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want. And there are no repercussions. In fact...

Being a conservative Democrat also makes you far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama's cabinet by 7-1.

Finally, if one of those crazy progressives decides to challenge you in a primary campaign, if you are a conservative Democrat you can also count on the endorsements of 95% of your congressional colleagues, the entire party leadership, and virtually every progressive advocacy organization. They will stand by you.

"Bonesparkle" at Scholars & Rogues took up the issue (H/t Kat):

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence...

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

...Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.

It's not a new idea. The same ideas play out in the run-up and aftermath to every major election cycle as progressives - perpetual victims - steel themselves to vote for people they're sure are going to screw them, get screwed, then wonder how to stop being screwed. Indeed, back in 2005 I contributed some ideas to the discussion a whole bunch of bloggers were having for a "coalition of the left", an American Solidarity movement which would be a progressive "big tent" outwith the self-imposed political rapings of the Democratic Party. The best round-up of the discussion came from American Samizdat.

Then, as now, the biggest real-world barrier to a divorce of progressives and Beltway Democrats is the way in which the big two parties have the electoral process sewn up at the earliest stages, making it nigh-on impossible for a new third party to get on the ballot in enough places to mount a truly national campaign. The biggest emotional barrier is the perennial notion that "this time it will be different" - the Dems playing Lucy with the football, as Fester likes to describe it. For the 2006 cycle, the football was Iraq. For 2008, it was Barack Obama himself and his promises even convinced cynical me to back off from urging that divorce. But Obama has become more and more a Tony Blair figure - he said a lot of stuff to get elected but on healthcare, the economy, social safety nets, interventionist foreign policy, state secrecy, torture and the Imperial presidency he's turned out not to mean a whole lot of those words.

No more excuses. "Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet."

Solidarinosc!

Lucy's Football

By Fester:

Ian Welsh has the outline of the Senate Finance Committee’s health insurance plan. The shorter version of the short version is that it sucks. Here is the short version of the plan:

1) Lower the medicaid coverage rate from 150% to 100% of the Federal poverty line, 133% for kids and pregnant women (once you have the baby, too bad for you)

2) Subsidies stop at 300% of the poverty line (was 400%)

3) No Public Option mentioned

4) Insurance exchanges at the State level

5) Must buy insurance unless it costs more than 15% of your income

6) A fine if you don’t buy insurance unless you’re below the Federal poverty line

For the most part, as Walker discusses, this is actually identical to or slightly worse than the plan put forward by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Yes, worse than the insurance industry’s plan. Remarkable. Baucus is really earning his campaign donations these days…. Without a public option, the insurance companies will have no check on their prices, let alone pressure to actually reduce them. Because people will be forced to buy bad insurance, they’ll hate the plan, and because “reform” has been passed, we’ll have to wait another 10 or 12 years for another shot....

Tim at Balloon Juice is very curious why Obama is not actively selling a strong public option proposal.

Watching Democrats try to fix health care I see a photo negative of the Bush years. Here is an issue with obvious urgency. Setting aside our shameful infant mortality rate, uninsured rate and other statistics, medical bills are by far the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Insurer misconducy wrecks lives every day in every city in America. The right options are obvious and relatively few in number. Huge majorities support doing the right thing.

Even self-interest is similarly one sided. Remember how much Republicans invested in realigning the destroying Social Security? Imagine if they had an issue that would realign the country in their favor and instead of huge majorities violently hating it, most Americans strongly supported what they wanted to do. Republican strategists would give two of their first three kids for a shot at an issue with this much going for it....

I hear that Obama supports the public option. That would mean more if it felt even a little more urgent than his idea that we should have a college football playoff series.

Belaboring the obvious, people who care about what they’re doing normally enter negotiations with some firm goal in mind. Most would agree that it is moronic to make negotiating itself the point.

Many others, including Steve have noted that if a major and effective health financing reform bill passed with either a pathway to de facto single payer for baseline care or at least a strong public option, major fundraising avenues will be closed off to some of the current veto points in the Senate and the House. I think that is part of the problem with the Democrats.

However, I would like to get a little more cynical for a moment. What if healthcare reform is to Democrats what abortion and anti-feminism is to Republicans in that both are seem by significant portions of their respective bases as high salience issues that are best served by never fully addressing? Gotta keep the activists in line and ready to donate and phone bank for two more incremental steps in the 'right' direction instead of attempting to systemically change the constraints of power and the political process.

Tim is right that an effective public plan option would be a system changer that would effectively tilt the political playing field to Democrats for at least a generation or two in much the same way that Social Security and Medicare are high salience, high effectiveness boundary conditions for Democrats to lean on. However the Democrats who would benefit from these changes are not neccessarily the Democrats who are currently in power or more importantly, currently occupying critical blocking positions. So reform that can shave off several points of GDP on health expenditures, improve coverage and re-align US politics is not a winning solution for the key set of stakeholders; instead their winning solution is to do just enough to avoid overwhelming political costs and pressure.

The Fruit Of Fearmongering

By Steve Hynd

Two reports today say that Americans are "overwhelmingly opposed" to closing Gitmo, don't have a favorable opinion of Moslems and don't much care if Moslems have an equally unfavorable opinion of interventionist Americans.

Is anyone surprised after so many years of fearmongering and American exceptionalism?

Yet American opinions are often based solely on that fearmongering for political ends - and Obama hasn't exactly been a shining star in rolling it back. Today, even as theformer CIA station chief for Pakistan says that claims of torture saving lives are false and that repeated claims torture foiled attacks only aid terrorists recruitment plans, Obama has been told that he cannot keep unclassified Gitmo evidence secret.

A federal judge rejected on Monday a U.S. government request to keep secret the unclassified evidence that it says justifies the continued imprisonment of more than 100 Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ruled the government cannot keep the documents known as factual returns from public disclosure and must seek court approval to keep specific information secret....The sealed court documents outlined the government's case for the continued holding of the detainees.

The judge ordered the U.S. Justice Department to publicly file its unclassified records or show the court what specific information it wants to keep secret by the end of next month.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, hailed the ruling.

"For far too long, the government has succeeded in keeping information about Guantanamo secret and used secrecy to cover-up illegal detention and abuse," he said. "The decision marks an important step towards restoring America's open court tradition that is essential to both accountability and the rule of law."

Americans are forming opinions based upon fear, lies and deception - and Democrats simply aren't interested in pushback against that, calculating that it might hurt them politically to do so. It's enough to launch Matt Taibbi on a truly righteous rant:

This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along — and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there’s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn’t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by “civilized” cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it’s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko. It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand — he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

Hey Matt? You are here.

 

MoveOn, CAP and The Wars

By Steve Hynd

Tom Hayden at The Nation is highly critical of the way in which anti-war groups like MoveOn have suddenly gone quiet following Obama's election, and accuses them of political expediency.

Silence sends a message. The de facto MoveOn support for the $94 billion war supplemental reverberates up the ladder of power. Feeling no pressure, Congressional leadership has abdicated its critical oversight function over the expanding wars, not even allowing members to vote for a December report on possible exit strategies.

Michael Hastings, who was Newsweek's Baghdad correspondent, backs up Hayden today in no uncertain terms:

I’ve mentioned this before: the startling lack of indignation by the anti-war left over our current course in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Obama wins, and the most influential online liberal organization obediently shuts up. Remember, we’re going to be in Iraq and Afghanistan at least until 2019. We still have over 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and we’ll have close to 70,000 in Afghanistan by the end of the year. (Which rivals the highest total number of Americans deployed overseas in the past eight years.)

Why has it been so easy for Moveon to just, uh, move on, from what had been their signature issue of Bush era? Part of it has to do with the fact that with an all volunteer force, the war is solely a political issue for them. (For the most part.) No skin is on the line for the folks at Moveon; they don’t have to fight the war, and never really feel the impact of the war. There’s not a draft, no real sense on the home front that we’re fighting a war at all. So it’s much easier to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when a sudden silence in opposing the war can be rationalized away as an expedient political position, despite all the worrying signs that these wars are nowhere near conclusion. The issue becomes intellectual, not actual. It’s easy to make political compromises when only your principles are at stake.

But it's not just MoveOn. Other groups like theCenter for American Progress have been far less vocally critical than they should have been about the benchmarkless, Bush-repeating Af/Pak plan or about what it is becoming more and more clear is an Obama administration attempt to ready for staying in Iraq past the SOFA's cut-off date by slight-of-hand and mission creep.

It's worth quoting Jeremy Scahill's snarky explanation of just what these groups are defending so hard again:

Ah, good thing the US quest for violent global domination was brought to a screeching halt with the November presidential election. Without Obama’s election, we’d still have an occupation of Iraq, mercenaries on the US payroll, torture of prisoners, an unending and worsening war that kills civilians in Afghanistan, regular airstrikes in Pakistan, killing civilians and an embassy the size of Vatican city in Baghdad, which was built in part on slave labor. Not to mention those crazy “Bush/Cheney” neocons running around trying to become the “CEOs” of foreign nations. Wow, glad that’s all over. Whew! And, it’s a really good thing Bush is no longer in power or else the US would come up with some crazy idea like building a colonial fortress in Pakistan to defend “US interests” in the region.

And now today we have Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett scathing about Obama's Iran policy in the New York Times. "Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough," the pair write. Yet there are elements within the Obama administration who see that as a feature, not a bug.

President Obama has made several policy and personnel decisions that have undermined the promise of his encouraging rhetoric about Iran. On the personnel front, the problem begins at the top, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Clinton ran well to the right of Mr. Obama on Iran, even saying she would “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Since becoming secretary of state, Clinton has told a number of allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf that she is skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will prove fruitful and testified to Congress that negotiations are primarily useful to garner support for “crippling” multilateral sanctions against Iran.

First of all, this posture is feckless, as Secretary Clinton does not have broad international support for sanctions that would come anywhere close to being crippling. More significantly, this posture is cynically counterproductive, for it eviscerates the credibility of any American diplomatic overtures in the eyes of Iranian leaders across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum.

Even more disturbing is President Obama’s willingness to have Dennis Ross become the point person for Iran policy at the State Department. Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

On all of this, groups such as CAP and MoveOn have either been silent or broadly supportive, excusing the obvious duplicity of Obama administration rhetoric.

Two weeks ago, former congressman Tom Andrews wrote that "Democrats in Washington can do much better; it's our job to make sure that they do." The trouble is, these pressure groups simply aren't doing that job.

I'll be straight up and unsubtle, as is my wont, and say why I think that's the case. I don't think MoveOn or CAP would have done anything essentially different if Clinton had been the Dem nominee. Their leaderships are wannabe Very Serious Persons and they see cheerleading as the path to Villager status or sinecures within the administration. There's more than a few other prominent Democrat voices who fit in that category too, having turned on a dime to support from Obama what they never would have from Bush. None are willing to bite the hand that feeds them, so they sacrifice their principles instead.

What's the value of Sestak?

By Fester:

It is looking more and more official that Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Montgomery County) will be launching an official primary challenge against Sen. Specter (D-PA, this week).  I'm trying to figure out if it is worth supporting Sestak with time and money or just the possibility of a vote. 

Logistically, Sestak is an attractive candidate.  He has a demonstrated capacity to win elections, he has a high probability of winning the general election against any known or probable Republican candidate and he can win in a district that is slightly more conservative than the state as a whole.  He'll be able to bring significant resources into the race with an initial $3 million dollar war chest which is several orders of magnitude greater than that of 2006 Democratic primary challengers.  He is a credible candidate and can build a credible campaign.  But is logistics sufficient for support?

Sestak is slightly right of center House Democrat, and a bit right of where one would expect a generic Democrat representing his particular district.  Sestak will not be significantly more liberal than Specter has been in the past few weeks if he was a Senator from Pennsylvania.  Senator Specter as a Democrat will be a bit to the right of the median Senate Democrat and to the right of the "generic" Democrat that Pennsylvania would normally support.  Given past history, the same would be said of Rep. Sestak. 

So the more basic question is a transactional political question; would working or supporting Sestak increase the probability of one or two high salience outcomes to be adapted than the counter-factual of no primary threat to Specter?  I think Specter's best defense is to find a 80% compromise for the EFCA which gets union neutrality in the primary and that will be a positive result from a primary challenge.  However EFCA is not in my top two or three things that I want to see changed, so the salience vector is weak. 

Right now, I'll give Sestak a chance to make his case, but I think I am reasonably indifferent to either candidate.  I know that I strongly prefer either over Toomey, but I don't think either meet the donate and door knock threshold. 

Amnesty On Obama's National Security Speech

By Steve Hynd

Obama's speech today confirmed that he intends to find a way to preserve eternal detention policies begun by the Bush administration as part of a plan to open a gap in the Laws of War for torture, black sites and illegal rendition. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post up analysing the speech and the unpalatable actions that lie behing Obama's always fine-sounding words.

Ultimately, what I find most harmful about his embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his -- Democrats, liberals, progressives -- will defend as well.  Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.

So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.

And Amnesty International has this statement:

"Today President Obama said the right words about returning to the rule of law and reclaiming America's moral authority. Now he needs to ensure his actions reflect American values and the rule of law.

"The president said that the struggle against terrorism is a struggle rooted in values. In the past eight years, the United States has abandoned deeply held principles and empowered those who seek to harm Americans. The president recognized the perils of sacrificing our values to pragmatism, which is precisely the challenge he faces in closing Guantanamo.

"Revising the military commissions is a mistake. It is a system so broken, so discredited, that it cannot be saved by any amount of administrative or legislative duct tape. Americans have put faith in their federal court systems for more than 200 years. All detainees can be tried in these courts and brought to justice. The rule of law must be our guide as the nation seeks to close Guantanamo and reclaim its moral authority.

"When the United States wanted to understand how something like September 11th was allowed to happen and how to prevent another occurrence, Americans turned to an independent and bipartisan commission. The country faces similar questions today regarding abuses committed in the name of national security. Americans cannot simply turn the page and pretend that these things never happened. An independent commission must be established to find the answers."

I, for one, am happy to be a "leftist purist ideologue" if that means that deeply valued moral principles about torture, the universal rule of law and executive privilege (privi lege = private law) come before temporary political considerations.

Gitmo detainees joke: ‘At least Bush released people.’

By Steve Hynd

The headline comes via Andy Worthington, who notes a London Times article on how detainee attitudes have soured since their intial euphoria at Obama's election. Andy goes on to note that, in the 115 days of Obama's presidency and despite the rhetoric of closing Gitmo for good, only two prisoners have been released: Binyam Mohammed and now Lakhdar Boumediene. Twenty-one other prisoners cleared for release by the courts are still incarcerated. Andy writes that "both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have failed to turn their words into actions" and continues:

As ever, the Obama administration needs to show that it has been listening to officials in the intelligence agencies who have been stating, for many years, that no more than a few dozen prisoners had any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda, and that, with the exception of most, or all of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, none “could possibly be called a leader or senior operative of al-Qaeda,” and to Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, who recently stated that “no more than a dozen or two of the detainees” had any worthwhile intelligence.

Obama and Holder also need to listen to the judges who, little by little, and despite willful obstruction by the Justice Department, are, as Judge Gladys Kessler demonstrated in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, destroying the cases against the majority of the prisoners, for one simple reason. In the absence of any knowledge about them when they first came into US custody (because they were mostly bought from the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, because the military was prohibited from screening them in Afghanistan to ascertain whether they were combatants or civilians, and because the Bush administration equated Taliban foot soldiers with al-Qaeda terrorists) the cases against them are, for the most part, built on a web of lies produced by prisoners who were tortured, coerced or bribed into making false confessions, and on a “mosaic” of intelligence that is based on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

That would be logical, yes - but then partisan politics and the Democrat's urge to cave gets involved.

President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison next January, a top Democratic official said Tuesday.

With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 241 detainees. [...]

It appears to be a tactical retreat. Once the administration develops a plan to close the facility, congressional Democrats are likely to revisit the topic, provided they are satisfied there are adequate safeguards.

As Steve Benen writes, the notion that closing Gitmo would be "putting terrorists in U.S. "neighborhoods," as Republicans have spun it, was always absurd. But the Dems caved anyway, because they felt that spin would lose them votes.

I'm told by an insider that the White House plan is still to close Gitmo no later than January next year, but that no-one should expect "we'll close the prison" to mean "we'll release the prisoners who are found innocent".

Obama Helps The Healthcare Industry Stack The Deck

By Steve Hynd

The big news for today is that the Obama administration, Dems on the Hill and the Healthcare Industry's fat cats have made a deal, with the latter offering to "squeeze $2 trillion in savings from projected increases over the next decade". The quid-pro-quo appears to be that single-payer won't be an option for healthcare reform under this administration.

Marc Ambinder focusses on the political implications, but Ezra Klein points out the deal being made, trading political oomph for money:

This is one of those moments when new words are being used to drown out ongoing actions. A major source of potential savings, at least in the administration's estimation, will come from comparative effectiveness review. But the pharmaceutical industry and the device industry -- both of which are represented here -- fought violently against CER when the Obama administration sought to include it in the stimulus. By the end, they had managed to win legislative language stating that comparative effectiveness studies wouldn't include cost-effectiveness and wouldn't be used to make coverage decisions. Another source of potential savings is the public plan, which can marry best practices with federal bargaining power to push down costs. The insurance industry has gone to war against this provision.

What we have, in other words, are promises of future cost containment that exist alongside concrete and continued opposition to the cost containment ideas that are actually on the table. And for good reason. A 1.5 percentage point decrease in health spending is a 1.5 percentage point decrease in medical industry profits. This commitment doesn't contain any examples of concessions that will reduce a participant's revenue streams. Conversely, every time legislators have proposed a reform that will actually cut industry profits -- and thus cut health spending -- the industry has howled in pain and anger. It's hard to sync that with promises to cut spending by $2 trillion over the next 10 years by implementing a set of unspecified reforms.

Indeed, the straight read of today's transaction is rather different. The White House gets messaging help. The health care industry secures, as Karen Tumulty says, "a seat at the negotiating table." The question is what they'll do with it.

The big test is not today. It's a month from now. In June, the Finance Committee will release the first version of its health reform bill.

But the signs from the Hill are not encouraging. You won't find single-payer advocates being called to give evidence before Baucus's committee:

Despite polling that shows a clear majority of public and physician support for a single-payer system, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has stated on multiple occasions that single payer is “off the table” of health reform.

Today’s round table, the second of three, consisted of 15 witnesses with no single-payer advocates among them. By contrast, several witnesses have direct ties to the for-profit, private health insurance industry.

...“It’s a pretty spectacular display of raw political power,” said Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action. “The health insurance industry demands that not one of the 15 people who testified today shall be a single-payer advocate. And the industry gets what it wants. It’s time for the American people to storm the gates and demand – put single payer on the table.”

Indeed, when eight single-payer advocates, including doctors, stood up during the opening comments of recent hearings to ask why their viewpoint was being excluded they were removed by Capitol police.

The above link and video come via our researcher, Kat, who writes: "You gotta hear the contempt in Baucus' voice when he says 'We need more police' - and then laughs as if to say these single-payer advocates don't have a clue.

Our friend Libby Spencer gets to the heart of what's wrong with the deal, from the other end of the income spectrum:

I have news for these people. I was already priced out of the present costs over a year ago and see nothing in my future that will allow me to meet payments that are contained by 1.5 percent. On a $750 monthly payment, we're talking about what, about $11.00? Sardonic laughter.

We need a affordable single payer option. Why aren't we seeing that on the table in these sham negotiations?

Because the Obama administration and Hill Democrats have helped the fat cats stack the deck inreturn for political messaging support and campaign contributions, Libby.

"If you’re not going to deliver now, when are you going to deliver?"

By Steve Hynd

Our researcher Kat flagged up a great DemocracyNow interview with The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent William Greider. In it he covers a lot of subjects, and his comments on America's militaristic foreign policy - which consists primarily of setting tripwires and red lines across the globe ready to trigger new conflicts - are spot on. But his comments on labor's relationship with the Democratic Party are particularly worth repeating:

Let me put it this way. The Democratic Party, after many years—and I’m a Democrat, I voted for Obama, I share those broad values very broadly—but they’ve had it both ways for twenty-five years or more, where they serve the financial interests and the big insurance companies and some other players, and at the same time they’re the party of working people. And that didn’t work very well for working people. But the Democrats always had an excuse: “Well, we don’t have the votes,” or “We’ve got this terrible Republican president in who won’t let us do good things for the folks.”

All those excuses are gone now, and we are seeing for the first time really in three decades the true nature of the Democratic Party. And it’s being tested and, so far, not doing very well. I won’t say it’s failed, but I think there’s a real possibility that it will.

The labor legislation is a good example. It’s actually—I’ve been around the issues of labor organizing and unions and what was happening to them over the last three decades. They were getting hammered by economic forces, like companies that broke every law in the land to keep them from organizing, firing the organizers, firing the workers who signed up. They really played vicious, hardball labor suppression and got away with it. The government never stepped in and stopped it.

So now labor wants a fairly modest bill, actually, to reform the processes of people organizing their own representatives. Sounds like democracy, doesn’t it? And the same forces are burying the politicians in propaganda and trying to convince the public this is a bad idea. And we’re seeing the Democratic Party, which now has virtually sixty votes in the Senate and a strong majority in the House, sort of saying, “Well, we don’t know if we can do this this year.”

I think — I’m going to speak to the steelworkers in Pittsburgh tomorrow, and I’ve told other labor groups this — this is also the time for labor to stand up. And it has to get much more explicit and dry-eyed with the Democratic Party in saying, “We’ve been there for you year after year with our votes, with our money, with our hearts and minds. If you’re not going to deliver now, when are you going to deliver?”

And if you don't, expect to see an exodus of Labor from the party's big tent. Like the collapse of the GOP, there comes a point where people that politicians are trying to fool all of the time won't take it any more.

Solidarinosc.

Political Prosecutions and Rove's "Permanent Republican Majority"

by anderson

After Ron's earlier posted piece about the Don Siegelman case, I thought I punch up a post (originally from shockfront) that is both relevant to that tale, and germane to the larger problem the Bush administration created in the DoJ (of course, to the GOP, corrupting the DoJ in service of electoral goals is a feature, not a bug).

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One of the questions that immediately sprang up in the wake of the US Attorney scandal was, what about the other 84 USAs who apparently did not meet with Karl Rove's disapproval?  Indeed, the Shields-Cragan study found a heavily biased litany of prosecutions of Democratic office holders, Democratic campaign contributors and other Democratic affiliates, where it was found that Democrats were seven (7) times more likely to be investigated and/or indicted by various accommodating US Attorneys, with generous help of the FBI.

Director John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard) has pieced together a documentary regarding the vast swamp of political prosecutions that occurred during the reign of GOP terror that has come to define the Bush regime.

The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove is a must see (and is going to be added to the Shockfront Must See TV section) McTiernan does something here that no one else has done, so far as I've seen: he has traced the pattern of low level prosecutions and found -- surprise! -- that much of the DoJ chicanery focused on the swing states.  Subsequent to the film's debut, and after thrashing about with the DoJ for two years in the wiretapping case of Anthony Pellicano, McTiernan now finds himself indicted again.  The timing of the indictment appears to be … inauspicious.

The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove.

Obama better start cleaning up the cesspool that still exists in the DoJ.  Will he?  Who knows given the grotesque fealty he's demonstrated to the Bush/Cheney crime bosses and their cabal of sniffing, not-so-legalistic toadies.  As with most Democrats, Obama seems to prefer to pretend that nothing is amiss, or that his fellow Democrats really are seven times more corrupt and scabrous than the GOP.

And if he believes that, perhaps he should consider moving to another party.  Then again, why bother?  The Democrats, after all, look like nothing so much as a front company for the GOP, which in turn operates as a front for various business sectors, especially Big Oil, Wall Street, the security-surveillance complex, and the M-I complex.  And when one is operating a front company, the parameters are known; criticisms about operations simply do not happen.

But that is a cop out.  Peoples' lives are being ruined.  Obama's AG, Eric the PlaceHolder, just recently denied a request by Paul Minor to attend his wife's funeral, dying recently after a long bout with cancer.  Minor is undeniably a victim of Rove's political strategy and yet Holder cruelly and unnecessarily denies Minor leave, while reprimanding the prosecutors in Ted Stevens' case, clearing Stevens' conviction altogether.  Yeah, figure that one out.

But things get worse.  Subsequent to clearing Stevens, Eric Holder then announced increased scrutiny of federal prosecutors "in the wake of mistakes in the Ted Stevens case."  Despite glaring irregularities -- if not outright criminality -- on the part of US Attorneys and Republican judges in cases involving fellow Democrats like Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, and many, many more, Eric Holder is now having a fit because Republican Ted Stevens got stiffed by Bush administration prosecutors.  In fact, in the wake of the Stevens disposition, a bipartisan group of 75 former state attorneys general have now sent a letter to Eric the PlaceHolder demanding a review of Siegelman's case, citing " gravely troubling facts" about the conduct of the federal prosecutors.  This follows a July, 2008 letter on the part of 44 state attorneys general, then urging a review of Siegleman's case by a Democratically controlled Congress, a letter which fell upon the moist, blind eyes of sputtering Democrats.

Obama and the rest of these clueless fucking Democrats better wake up to what is going on and what is in place to rekindle the GOP's electoral prospects.  We hear a lot of flapping jowls these days, all talking about how the GOP have been cast into the political wilderness for some indefinite period, and that they have no ideas.

Well, they have one idea.