Progressive Populist 16.7

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The Progressive

POPULIST

APRIL 15, 2010 • A JOURNAL FROM AMERICA’S HEARTLAND • VOL. 15, NO. 7 • $2

Big Money Floods Judicial Elections The Citizens United ruling clears the way for business to buy favorable judges with campaign money.

By SHERRILYN IFILL s anyone who’s followed judicial elections for the past 10 years could have predicted, the Citizens United decision, striking down limits on corporate campaign spending, is likely to unleash a virtual run on judicial elections in some states. Judicial elections — especially for state Supreme Courts — have become been ugly, bitter, partisan battles in which millions of dollars are spent, largely to unseat incumbents in many states. The result is a judiciary that lacks the appearance and in some instances the reality of impartiality required by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has played a huge role in intensifying this problem — beginning with the Court’s ill-considered 5-4 decision Republican Party of Minnesota v.

White in 2001. In that case, the Court struck down state rules that forbade candidates from judicial office from announcing their views about contested legal issues that might come before the court. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia conveniently saw only the First Amendment dimensions of the case and none of the 14th.

Yes, judicial candidates have free speech rights. But those rights should have been balanced by the countervailing due process rights of litigants to appear before an impartial tribunal. Instead Justice Scalia, and Justice O’Connor writing in her concurrence, took the position that if states are unwise enough to elect their judges, they will simply have to take their medicine and drop rules that attempt to mediate between the free speech rights of candidates and the public right to a bench that looks and is impartial. O’Connor in particular seemed to think that the Court’s decision in White might encourage states to abandon judicial elections in favor of merit selection.

But the decision by states to elect their judges was a deliberate, conscious choice. In the mid 1800s the spread of Jacksonian Democracy convinced populists that state court judges were too removed from the public, and too often appointed from the wealthy classes. They sought a judiciary that would be account-

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INSIDE: REFORM WE CAN BUILD ON EDITORIAL, PAGE 2

Illustration by DOLORES CULLEN

FORECLOSURE CRISIS

BANKING REFORM

The recession is easing, but millions Financial reform shouldn’t be complicated. of families are still anxious about Regulators should protect consumers, not being tossed out on the streets. reckless bankers and stockbrokers.

ROGER BYBEE, PAGE 8

ROBERT BOROSAGE, PAGE 10

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The Progressive

POPULIST A Journal from America’s Heartland Business Office: P.O. Box 487 Storm Lake, Iowa 50588 712-732-4991 fax: 712-732-4331 Subscription Information: 1-800-732-4992 USPS 016011. Periodicals postage paid at Storm Lake, Iowa 50588. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Progressive Populist, P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, Iowa 50588-0487.

Editorial Office: P.O. Box 819 Manchaca, Texas 78652 512-828-7245 Email: editor@populist.com http://www.populist.com JAMES M. CULLEN Editor ART CULLEN Managing Editor DOLORES CULLEN Illustrator GAYLE GOFF Proofreader STEVE HAMILTON Legal Counsel JOHN CULLEN Publisher The Progressive Populist is an employeeowned, independent journal that believes in the Bill of Rights and that the truth shall make us free. Writers are responsible for their own work. In publishing them we do not necessarily agree with them, but we think their points of view are worth sharing.

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This issue in The Progressive

POPULIST COVER/Sherrilyn Ifill p. 1 Big money floods judicial elections EDITORIAL p. 2 Reform we can build on JIM HIGHTOWER p. 3 Granny D R.I.P.; Drowning democracy in corporate money; Who’s watching Wall St. watchdog?; Oxymoron: Texas education; When Tom speaks, people giggle LETTERS TO THE EDITOR p. 4 RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5 Democracy isn’t pretty but it’s all we got DISPATCHES p. 5 Most courageous and most cowardly Dems; New push for public option; Americans view health reform favorably; Chamber won’t spend on repeal push; Bum’s Rush ...

CONNIE SCHULTZ p. 6 Job or no job, he’s still her hero JONATHAN THOMPSON p. 6 Wyoming turbine tax good for wind power

AN EDITORIAL Reform We Can Build On ow that the health insurance reform bill is signed into law, perhaps the mainstream media can get to work calling down the Republicans and teabaggers for the lies they have been telling about the reform efforts over the past year.

In fact, there are no “death panels,” and there never were.

Seniors will keep their Medicare benefits. In fact, those seniors who hit the “donut hole” for prescription drug expenses will get a $250 rebate this year, thanks to the Democrats. The reform bill is paid with taxes on wealthy individuals and the health care industry and it actually reduces the federal deficit.

The new law also gives small businesses a 35% tax credit to help pay for health insurance for their employees. Community health centers will get federal funds to double the number of health center sites to 15,000 and double the number of patients they can see to 40 million over the next five years. The National Health Service gets $1.5 billion to train more than 17,000 primary-care doctors, nurses and other public health professionals to serve in medically underserved areas.

Aside from the hysteria about a government takeover, the reforms are conservative, preserving the role of private insurance, but they provide a foundation on which progressives can build. Within 90 days, the law creates a re-insurance program to offset costs of expensive health claims for employers that provide health benefits for retirees aged 55-64; it provides a high-risk pool for Americans who are uninsured because of a pre-existing condition.

Within six months, the law bans health plans from dropping people from coverage when they get sick; it bans discrimination against children (under 19 years) with pre-existing conditions; it bans lifetime limits on coverage; it restricts annual limits on coverage; it requires free preventive care under new private plans, it ensures consumers in new plans have a process to appeal denials of coverage by their health insurance plan; and it allows parents to keep their children on their insurance policy until their 26th birthday.

Effective Jan. 1, 2011, the law eliminates co-payments for preventive services under the Medicare program; it requires that plans in the individual and small group market spend 80% of premium dollars on medical services, and large group plans must spend 85% on medical services, and insurers must provide rebates to policyholders if they spend less. It also creates a long-term care insurance program to be financed by voluntary payroll deductions to provide benefits to adults who become functionally disabled.

Enacting those aforementioned provisions would be a good day’s work, but in 2014, federal regulations will prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against all customers due to health status, gender or pre-existing conditions. Health plans will no longer be able to impose annual limits of individual coverage.

Then health insurance exchanges will be set up in each state to enable individuals and small employers to compare standardized health packages. Yes, people will be required to have some sort of insurance, but tax credits will help individuals with incomes up to 400% of the poverty level buy insurance through the state exchange. That is, individuals making up to $43,320 or a family of four making $88,200 would get assistance or face a tax that increases from $95 in 2014 to $695 in 2016.

Businesses with 50 or more employees that do not offer coverage to their employees will have to pay $2,000 annually for each full-time employee over the first 30 as long as one of their employees receive a tax credit.

Medicaid eligibility will increase to 133% of poverty for all non-elderly individuals, or $29,327 for a family of four. That is a huge improvement. Ron Pollak of Families USA noted to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that in 43 states, childless adults are excluded from Medicaid. For parents, the median income eligibility is 69% of poverty and it runs as low as 25% of poverty.

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JIM VAN DER POL p. 6 Raw deals for family farmers GENE LYONS p. 7 It’s time for Wall Street to pay DAVID SIROTA p. 7 What’s the matter with Democrats?

ROGER BYBEE p. 8 Foreclosure crisis persists ANDREW LEONARD p. 8 How not to learn from a financial crisis BOB BURNETT p. 9 Dangerous visions for desperate times MARK MANSPERGER p. 9 Are we on the road to socialism?

DON ROLLINS p. 9 Confessions of a social justice communist DEAN BAKER p. 10 When US becomes Greece ROBERT BOROSAGE p. 10 All you need to know about bank reform ARIANNA HUFFINGTON p. 11 Is ‘Undercover Boss’ most subversive TV show?

RYAN ALEXANDER p. 11 Taxpayers are getting nuked ROBERT REICH p. 12 How healthcare reform makes history JOE CONASON p. 12 Boehner is angry — and GOP should worry

2 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

The federal government will pick up all the cost of new Medicaid enrollees through 2018. In Texas, where an estimated 6.1 million people — one quarter of the state’s population — now go without health coverage, expansion of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance is expected to cover 2 million of those Texans in 2014 but state officials are complaining that it will increase the state’s workload. State workers already are struggling to enroll low-income Texans in the food stamp program as quickly as the federal government requires (there was a backlog of 42,000 applicants last fall). Instead of making plans to step up to the task, Gov. Rick Perry denounced the expansion and Attorney Gen. Greg Abbott announced he would join other Republican state attorneys general in challenging the health insurance mandate as unconstitutional.

Now, I don’t like being told that I have to buy private insurance either, but that doesn’t mean we should let people go without insurance. The answer is to cover everybody under Medicare — or at least give us the opportunity to buy into that popular government insurance program. But you don’t see Republicans taking that tack. Instead, they are signing onto a frivolous lawsuit that only proves that those attorneys general are ignorant of Art. 1, Sec. 8 of the Constitution.

The reforms will be paid for, in part, with taxes on insurance companies, drug companies, medical device manufacturers and people making more than $200,000 a year, along with phaseout of the inefficient Medicare Advantage program. In 2018, an excise tax on high-cost employer-provided health plans becomes effective. The tax, paid by insurance companies, will hit plans worth more than $10,200 per year for individuals or $27,500 for families, with higher thresholds in high-risk professions, and the thresholds will be indexed with inflation.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has refuted the Republican lie that health reform will increase the federal deficit. In fact, according to the best estimates, the reforms will reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first 10 years and more than $1 trillion over 20 years.

Again, we think a more sensible and efficient solution would be to expand Medicare to cover all Americans. Failing that, Congress should allow Americans to buy into Medicare instead of being forced to buy private insurance. But we have three years to see how private insurance handles the push for universal health coverage before anybody is forced to buy anything. In the meantime, as Republicans push for repeal of the health insurance reforms, voters may wonder why they would want to return to the days when insurance companies can deny coverage to children with pre-existing health problems or rescind coverage to customers who had paid their premiums once they turn up with a medical condition or women can be charged higher rates simply because they’re women.

Republicans want to repeal all that to keep the status quo.

In the past year they have resisted efforts to draft a health reform bill. Then the GOP resisted attempts to bring the bill to a vote. Then, after the Senate passed the bill with some controversial pork barrel provisions demanded by conservative Democrats, Republicans even resisted efforts in the reconciliation process to fix the complaints that those same Republicans had.

The Democrats — without a single Republican vote — managed to pass the health insurance overhaul fair and square. It is expected to add more than 30 million Americans to the ranks of the insured. That coverage perhaps will save the lives of 30,000 people annually who will be able to afford timely medical attention that previously they might have been put off until it was too late. And a person with a medical condition will be able to change jobs or even start his or her own business without fearing being left without insurance coverage.

Republicans think they can win in November by urging voters to reject those reforms.

I think Democrats can win that debate.

— JMC

MARK POTOK p. 12 They say they want a revolution NORMAN SOLOMON p. 13 Zero public option + one mandate = disaster FROMA HARROP p. 14 Will Snowe fall in Maine?

JESSE JACKSON p. 14 Infrastructure deficit catches up with US STEVE KORNACKI p. 14 Healthcare triumph a credit to Pelosi’s savvy HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas p. 15 Health policy at the movies BILL JOHNSTON p. 15 Never asked, didn’t care SAM URETSKY p. 15 Safer drugs another victim of lobbyists WAYNE O’LEARY p. 16 Jobs, Jobs, Jobs GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet p. 16 Push back and protest JOHN BUELL p. 16 Building productive enterprise MARK WEISBROT p. 17 Greenspan’s nightmare is Third World’s dream PAUL F. deLESPINASSE p. 17 Criminalizing a drink of water AMERICAS/Roberto Rodriguez p. 18 Census: Latinos can ID as indigenous

ALEXANDER COCKBURN p. 18 Are Obama and Hillary really bumblers?

PUBLIC INTEREST/Ralph Nader p. 19 Filibuster flim flam TED RALL p. 19 I wish I were a Republican JIM CULLEN p. 20 SXSW: What’s up, docs?

SAM PIZZIGATI p. 20 Did US founders want government small?

ROB PATTERSON p. 21 The man behind ‘Joey Ramone’ POPULIST PICKS p. 21 Catch ‘The Cove’ EDGE OF SPORTS/Dave Zirin p. 21 Root for Ed O’Bannon to upset the NCAA AMY GOODMAN p. 22 NYC’s jihad against Debbie Almontaser GARRISON KEILLOR p. 22 Play ball!

ANDREW LEONARD p. 22 Health care? Done. Next up: The banks DONALD KAUL p. 23 Recipe for fighting the party of no POET/Michael Silverstein p. 23 Make Tim Geithner go Cover illustration by Dolores Cullen

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JIM HIGHTOWER She encountered a rattlesnake in Texas and Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.

Granny D RIP The Heartbeat of America’s Democratic Reform Movement t read like just another obituary written about someone who’d lived a very long time: “Doris Haddock died peacefully in her family home,” it began. “Born in 1910, she lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She is survived by her son, eight grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.”

Oh, and one other thing: “She walked across the United States at age 90 to rally public support for campaign finance reform.”

Doris Haddock — better known as “Granny D” — was not your usual elderly lady, living her last years in quiet repose.

She had always been that finest of the American species: a “Citizen” — with a capital C — one who stayed engaged in the public issues of her time.

She was small in size, gentle by nature and soft-spoken, but she had the heart of Sojourner Truth, Ida Tarbell, Mother Jones and Rachel Carson beating within her, and she was neither afraid to speak out nor hesitant to take what actions she could.

In her late 80s, Doris took note of the ever-spreading scourge of the corrupt cash that’s choking the very life out of our democratic political system. She was outraged that she would be leaving such a foul political inheritance to her grandchildren.

Rather than sit and seethe, she wanted to make a statement, to do something. But how could just one person with no connections or clout make her voice heard, much less make a difference?

“I’ll walk,” she decided. Not down to town hall. Across America. The full length of it! Her grandchildren feared their Granny D had finally lost her grip on reality. But she was the very voice of calm reason, and she was resolute.

On New Year’s Day 1999, this petite, unknown lady donned her emblematic straw hat, unfurled her banner calling for publicly financed clean elections and headed east from Pasadena, Calif. Destination: Washington, D.C. For the next 14 months, Granny D traversed our country, walking 10 miles a day, lifting hearts all along the way. She weathered 105-degree deserts and a blinding snowstorm, but she kept going. She encountered a rattlesnake in Texas and Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, but she kept going. She had to have her feet taped sometimes and had to wear a steel corset to help her back, but she kept going.

The national political cognoscenti had been claiming that ordinary Americans didn’t care about the arcane issue of campaign finance reform, but Doris proved them liars. Hundreds of people of all political stripes would turn out as she approached every town or city, greeting her and cheering her on. They simply loved her, loved both the anger and hope she represented, loved her message and mission — and they signed on to join her rebellion against the moneyed powers controlling American politics and government.

Thousands (including me) joined her as she entered Washington on Feb. 29, 2000. We walked with her across the Potomac, past the Lincoln Memorial, right up the K Street corridor where corporate lobbyists roost and on to the Capitol itself.

From the east steps of this edifice of American democracy, she addressed the throng with a moving portrayal of her 3,000-mile journey through the heart of our country: “The people I met along my

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way have given me messages to deliver here. The messages are many, written with old and young hands of every color, and yet the messages are the same. They are this: ‘Shame on you, senators and congressmen, who have turned the headquarters of a great and self-governing people into a bawdyhouse.’”

Doris Haddock made her voice heard.

Throughout the last decade of her life, she embodied the national yearning for democratic reform and rallied a movement that has successfully pushed for local and state clean-election laws that give our “people’s voice” real strength against the moneyed interests.

Granny D, 100 years old, died March 9, but her strong heart beats in everyone who dares to confront the corporate corrupters of our democratic system. To keep that beat going, connect with others engaged in this essential effort: www.grannyd.com.

Drowning Democracy in Corporate Money an five votes make a difference in America’s democratic elections? You betcha, as Sarah Palin might say. Especially when those five voters are Supreme Court justices hell bent on allowing the unlimited money power of corporate giants to drown out the people’s democratic voice.

But wait, say apologists for the five Supreme voters who hung this plutocratic albatross around the neck of our democracy — it’s not just corporations who were freed by the Court to spend billions to elect or defeat candidates. They smugly point out that labor unions, too, can now take their members’ dues money and dump as much of it as they want into their campaigns. So, see, the ruling justices took care to be “fair and balanced.”

Where’ve we heard that phrase before?

Balanced? Even if every union were to liquidate all of their assets and set aside every dime they have for elections, their total war chest would be $6 billion. Just one Wall Street firm, Goldman Sachs, doled out three times more than that in bonus payments to its bankers this year alone. Indeed, the combined union assets of $6 billion adds up to a mere one-tenth of one percent of the assets held by only the four largest banks in our country.

Yet, the Court’s corporate supremists have now equated the freedom to spend money on elections with our people’s freedom of speech. This means that those with the most money get the most speech.

What’s fair about that?

As an indicator of how imbalanced our brave new world of money-based elections will be, check this out: the 100 largest American corporations have annual incomes totaling $13 trillion. Henceforth, they can tap this ocean of political clout to elect policymakers who will do their bidding — not ours.

To help undo the Court’s coup against us, connect with freespeechforpeople.org.

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own board of directors. The CEO himself certified the misleading figures, and the report cites him for being “at least grossly negligent.” The bank’s accounting firm, Ernst & Young, also knew of the manipulation — but raised no protest.

So this is why well-tailored, high-class professionals must be regulated: in a pinch, they cheat.

But regulation must be truly independent, for guess who else knew about Lehman’s financial shell game even as it was happening? The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed at the time by our present treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. He had dispatched officials to assess the bank’s health, but they raised no alarm about the accounting gimmickry.

Wall Street and the Fed have long been two peas in a cozy pod, with the socalled regulators treating the bankers as trusted colleagues. These giant banks deserve no public trust, but neither does the Fed.

Oxymoron: Texas Education love nuts. Pecans, hazelnuts, almonds, pistachios — I love them all. But my favorite nuts by far are those homegrown natives on the Texas Board of Education.

You just can’t get any nuttier than this bunch!

This little known board is making our state a punch line for comedians everywhere, because the majority of the panel’s members are ultra-right-wing nutballs.

How nutty? They’re insisting that ideological indoctrination be paramount over education in the state’s classrooms. The board’s main power is to adopt curriculum standards for textbooks to be used from first grade through high school — and they’ve just put forth some whoppers in their unrelenting effort to plant their own ignorance in our history, government, economics, and sociology textbooks.

For example, they shoved Delores Huerta, the much-admired farm worker leader, from the list of people who exemplify good citizenship, dismissing this historic champion of justice as a socialist. On the other hand, the majority mandated that such right-wingers as Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America be taught in history classes.

Speaking of justice, nutty board members were so offended by this core American concept of “fair treatment for all” that they stripped it from a list that instructs grade schoolers on the characteristics of good citizenship! No doubt they’d also strike “justice” from our Pledge of Allegiance if they could.

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Among others getting their historybook status diminished were such giants as American democracy as Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. — while those getting a boost include Joe McCarthy and Jefferson Davis. Texas education wasn’t that great before this radical insistence on right-wing correctness, but these doctrinaire morons are turning the phrase “Texas education” into an oxymoron.

When Tom Speaks, People Giggle , let us rejoice, for he’s back! Tom DeLay, I mean — the corrupt ego maniac who rose to power in the US House of Representatives before falling into disgrace over his habit of trading legislative favors for corporate campaign cash.

Not only was DeLay a poster boy of congressional corruption during the Republican years of this decade, but he also pushed some of the goofiest, most extreme ideas spawned by right-wing ideologues.

For example, while he consistently prevented increases in the minimum wage for the lowest-paid Americans, he just as consistently saw to it that his own congressional pay was increased annually.

When confronted with this hypocrisy, Tom blurted out, “I challenge anyone to live on my salary.” He was making $166,000 a year! You hear a guy say something like that and you think: a hundred thousand sperm and you were the fastest?

Unfortunately for commentators like me, DeLay got indicted in 2005 and dropped off the political radar. But now — O, Glory — he’s back! There he was on CNN recently, wallowing once again in the mud of right-wing gibberish. There should be no extension of unemployment benefits for the millions of Americans in today’s severely depressed job market, he grunted.

Why? Because, asserted Tom, such a program “Keeps people from going and finding jobs.”

Shaking her head incredulously, the interviewer asked if he was actually saying that people were unemployed because they want to be? “Well,” answered this once-powerful lawmaker, “it is the truth, and people in the real world know it.”

The real world? Tom hasn’t even visited there for decades. But bless his heart, thank goodness he’s not letting reality intrude into his fantasy world, and thank goodness he’s back on TV. I for one find his insights as refreshing as ever.

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Populist sparkplug Jim Hightower is a bestselling author. Write him at 81 San Marcos St., Austin TX 78702 or see www.jimhightower.com.

Who’s Watching Wall Street Watchdog? all Street executives are howling that there’s no need for big bad government to tighten regulations over their financial dealings. We’re not thieves, they huff, we’re high-class professionals with auditors, boards of directors and shareholders guiding us. We can regulate ourselves — trust us!

Uh ... no. Let’s look to Lehman Brothers for an object lesson in trusting Wall Street elites. When it collapsed into bankruptcy in 2008, the official word was that it was a victim of bad mortgages. Nothing amiss, just ... unfortunate. Now, however, a newly-released bankruptcy report reveals that top executives at the investment house were desperately “Enroning” its books.

Using an accounting flim-flam, they spent nearly a year before Lehman’s denouement manipulating its books to hide the rapidly deteriorating state of its financial condition.

This “creative accounting” was done to deceive shareholders and Lehman’s

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all in one place • jim hightower • arianna huffington • amy goodman • gene lyons • froma harrop • connie schultz • donald kaul • garrison keillor • ted rall • jesse jackson • joan retsinas • alexander cockburn •

the progressive populist THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010 — 3

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR lies and personal fortunes all for the sake of When We pleasing a few zealots and fanatics. “Willful attempts” can be described anyway a prosGot Scared ecutor wishes to define them; not seeing a doctor while pregnant (maybe you can’t afour 3/1/10 cover article, “Scared Witless” asks a very good question: “When did we become such a nation of scaredy cats?”

One doesn’t have to look too far into our past — if you consider 150 years not too far. Slaves were freed. Then more people from Eastern Europe and foreignspeaking people came. The -isms began: Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Americanisms, Nationalism. We often couldn’t exactly define them, we just knew some were really bad or really good. And rather than trying to educate the electorate, some politicians used peoples’ fears as a way to get elected. And since some things were hard to explain, they became even more scary — and less explained. And it worked as a tool for some politicians to get elected.

That’s why we have so much fear of so many things. And the people’s power grows less as the politicians’ grows more. And that’s what they want. So they do it more!

As long as people buy it, they’ll sell it.

Republicans don’t change the product, they just change the sales pitch. If they really wanted the country to prosper, they’d have more regulation of business practices that were unfair to customers, higher wages so people could buy things, affordable housing, more voting that’s less restrictive, “no cost” political speech on TV and radio, more productive political debate.

They win by preaching that “only they can save us from whatever they’ve convinced us is very scary.” And then, when they get in, they’re scary. If you disagree with them, you’re — of course — wrong. If you agree with them, you’re responsible when things go — of course — wrong because of their approach to everything. You can’t win, in other words, while they stay in power. And that’s all it’s about.

So when did all this begin? About 150 years ago, at least. Isn’t it time we all got smarter than this?

CHERYL LOVELY Presque Isle, Maine

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Gun Restrictions Preceded Decline mostly agree with Richard L. Morgan (“No apologies for Obama,” 3/15/10 TPP). However, I am left wondering: How does Mr. Morgan conclude that restoring gun freedoms, which were commonplace back when America truly was a constitutional republic, will now cause it to implode?

It would seem more accurate to conclude that the last century of increasingly restrictive and ineffective gun laws coincides with the decline of our constitutional republic.

RICHARD J. BEUKEMA Wayland, Mich.

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‘Pro Life’ Goes Too Far he Utah State Legislators has ended their 2010 session with a crowning victory for the most extreme faction of the anti abortionists. Whatever your position is on abortion, I think all sensible people can agree that Utah’s pro-life faction has gone too far. Women who suffer a miscarriage in Utah can now be investigated (with intent to convict and incarcerate) for murder. You read that right; miscarriage equals murder in Utah.

In Utah any woman who has a miscarriage will immediately become a murder suspect and subject to a police investigation. Based on one incident of a 17-year-old girl who paid a friend to hit her belly in an attempt to terminate a pregnancy every woman who miscarries will be suspected of willful attempts to terminate hers.

Placed in the hands of unscrupulous prosecutors is a law that can destroy fami-

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ford a doctor visit), staying with an abusive partner (fear keeps many in such relationships), not eating a healthy diet (can’t afford that, too bad you baby killer). It takes zero imagination to see the unintended consequences of this odious bill.

I urge all readers with a sense of justice, compassion and common decency to contact Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and this bill’s creator, Rep. Carl Wimmer and let them know what a bad idea this is.

PAUL AMES Eureka, Utah

Nuclear Options men to Ralph Nader’s “No Nukes” in the Public Interest column and Amy Goodman’s “Nuclear Option” column (3/15/10 TPP). The streets of the plant near downtown St. Louis where the uranium was processed for the first three atomic bombs (Los Alamos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are washed down weekly because their dust is still radioactive. Nevada wants no spent uranium stored at Yucca Mountain (aptly named).

During the Great Depression the federal government built Bagnell Dam hydroelectric power plant that created the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri and similar ones throughout our nation. Missouri has a Taum Sauk Reservoir that pumps water from a lower reservoir to an upper one when electrical demand is low and that water converts the pump to electrical generators when the demand is high. Taum Sauk may be repeated at Church Mountain in Missouri and elsewhere in the USA so that solar and wind power may be networked into the electrical grid and stored.

The planned hydroelectric power plant on the Meremac River should be built as well.

JOSEPH J. KUCIECZYK St Louis Mo.

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Military Rules ecretary of State Clinton said she fears Iran is heading toward a military dictatorship. But while she looks at the tiny military grain of sand that is Iran she fails to see the mountain of military spending and control over the USA. After World War Two the US had three times the military weapons and supply piled up than was used up in the war.

What was not sold for a penny on the dollar’s worth to arms dealers and surplus dealers was given to foreign countries and dumped in the ocean or scrapped for junk.

While civilian goods were rationed and people urged to buy war bonds that inflation would eat up the interest when the bonds were ripe, soldiers’ pay was $30 a month and it took an act of Congress to pay front-line soldiers an extra $10 a month, the military industry grew fat and they have ever since kept control of Congress and military spending.

The new enemy was the Communists for the next 45 years with the Korean War and Vietnam and the Cold War stockpiling nuclear and chemical weapons in a stupid arms race while brainwashing the public to be zombies afraid to speak out.

And now its a religious crusade of Christians against Islam with $12 billion wasted each month in Iraq alone on a war that was promoted by Dick Cheney and his gang with lies.

Now the USA is so deep in debt that Communist China is our largest creditor.

President Obama has named former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) to his Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to come up with federal deficit reduction. And while Simpson alone can be trusted not to play some hypocrisy con game, this group of former political people will never consider cutting military spending and every year military spending goes up. The only spending cuts will be in basic

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4 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

domestic needs.

That slogan “Support The Troops” is a lot of crap to support military spending. I had seven older brothers in World War Two and I was in Korea in 1952 and Vietnam in 1967. We cannot afford as a nation to accept limitless costs for militarization and war at the expense of the needs of our children and their future.

AL HAMBURG Torrington, Wyo.

Corporate Whores y very recent observation is that Democrats are elected to do the dirty work that Republicans can’t.

It was Clinton who pushed through NAFTA, repealed Glass-Steagall, signed welfare reform legislation ending safety nets for the poor, expanded corporate welfare, and enacted many more Republican initiatives. Progressives fall behind the Democratic leaders, but they will at least pretend to fight Republicans. Bush tried to privatize Social Security and failed. Now we have Obama to make it happen, but privatizing Medicare will take precedence and this health care bill will make that happen. Thank you!

The New Deal Democrats are all dead. All we’re left with today are the New Democrats; aka “corporate whores”.

FRANCES TEGNAZIAN Orlando, Fla.

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Single Payer Errors have been a citizen lobbyist for a National Single Payer Universal Health Insurance system over the last 30 years, ever since I observed how well my Canadian mother, as well as many relatives and friends, were served by their system, and I am pretty knowledgeable about this subject. Also, I have been a supporter of Public Citizen, a strong supporter of HR 676, a Single Payer system, for over 30 years.

In your editorial, you have stated that HR 676 would be a Socialist system. Not so! We already do have a socialist system that is the best-run health care system in our nation: the Veterans Administration. It is not only funded by the government, but the hospitals are owned by the government, and the doctors and other health care staff are employed by the government.

England has a socialist system, with the government employing doctors and staff, and owning the hospitals. Most of the other developed nations, including Canada, have systems with the government as the insurer, but the hospitals and staff are private. HR 676 would be such a system, where Medicare would be the insurance administrator, processing all billing (administrative costs for Medicare are under 4% as compared to closer to 30% through private insurers), but all doctors and staff, and hospitals would be either private or municipally owned, as they are now.

You also stated that private insurers would be put out of business if HR 676 legislation was enacted — also not true. In Canada, although the private companies complained that they would go out of business if a Single Payer system were established, they are still surviving profitably, insuring luxuries, such as private and semiprivate hospital rooms, travel insurance, and the more frivolous kinds of cosmetic surgery.

Unfortunately, most of our members of Congress are “bought” by the private health-related industries, through over-generous campaign contributions. They serve their pay-masters, not us — especially since the Supremes opened the flood-gates of corporate campaign largesse!

Our only hope of getting any progressive legislation that would serve all of us “little” people, would be if we can have true Campaign Finance Reform, as is now practiced for intrastate elections, in six states. Its genesis was in New Hampshire, developed by ex-Congressman John L. Rauh, for all state legislative seats as well as the gubernatorial position, and was since adopted by Maine, Connecticut, Arizona, New Mexico and North Carolina. The citizens of those states are so happy with their system that, when they were polled, 83% wanted to keep their system. To learn more about this system, look up their web-

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site, www.YouStreet.org. Ex-presidential candidate Bill Bradley, ex-Republican Sens.

Alan Simpson and Warren Rudman, and even political satirist Stephen Colbert are joining forces to try to co-opt this system for the rest of the nation. It would give qualifying candidates a choice to use ‘clean public money’ to finance their campaigns, so that they would have no quid pro quo obligations, as they do now, in return for the fat corporate contributions.

ROBIN E. NADEAU St. Augustine, Fla.

Wallace’s Missed Opportunity aving lived through the complete Depression and FDR’s administrations I found Nate Pedersen’s article (“Bad Timing Crushed Progressive Wallace,” 3/15/10 TPP) interesting and accurate as regards Henry Wallace. FDR actually gave William Douglas’ name to the committee as his preferred running mate in his last term, but was forced to take Truman, as Nate says. This was a tragic error as to its effect on our history as Truman was a military man and of the 17 ambassadors he appointed 16 were military people. There would never have been a Cold or Korean War since Douglas was respected and trusted by Stalin. Truman hated Stalin. If Douglas was in power Stalin would have been advised of the Atomic Bomb and assuredly advised of our intentions to drop it on Japan although it’s more likely Douglas would have used it on a strictly military target.

Did you know that within one week of dropping the Bomb every newspaper of importance had drawings on their front pages showing how much of Moscow we could destroy if we dropped the bomb on it? Remember we were still allies. The Russian people were stunned by this unconscionable act and were reported crying as they asked Americans over there how we could do such a terrible thing to them. We thought you were our friends they kept repeating.

This very act destroyed any possibility of we being friends and laid the grounds for the Cold War. Remember they had lost 21 million people in the War. Even Stimson, Secretary of War, wrote a letter (a copy of which I believe I still have) asking Truman to share the knowledge of making the Bomb with Russia, obviously feeling they would eventually find it out anyway and doing so would solidify our friendship and lead to our cooperating peacefully.

Truman’s election to the presidency was a tragedy we’re still suffering from.

ALTON ELIASON Northford, Conn.

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Who’s In Control avid Sirota is right on when he says (“Rogues Gone Wild,” 3/15/10 TPP) that our president is not in control but is being controlled. Old Harry Truman stared down a much more powerful and popular general than McChrystal and came out on top. Much has changed since then. We think of Reagan and Bush as strong executives, but then they were giving the Pentagon a free rein. When Obama wanted to close Guantanamo he found out who was in charge. I was not aware of the DEA insubordination but it is just another example. The Republicans say he will be a one term president and just maybe the CIA said he might not finish one term. Remember JFK? CARROLL JOHNSON Douglassville, TX

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RURAL ROUTES/Margot Ford McMillen This is what democracy looks like. Messy, loud, awkward, inconvenient. And sometimes absurd.

Democracy Isn’t Pretty But It’s All We Got magine a scribbler, maybe one of those horrible scribbling women Nathaniel Hawthorne was always complaining about, sitting at her computer and blasting out a screed headlined, “The End of Democracy!” or “Where’s the Outrage?” and then poofing it off to a list of five of her closest friends. One opens and reads it. One opens it, reads it, sends it on. The other three delete it.

The forwarded piece is forwarded over and over again, giving one out of five readers enough of a poke of adrenalin to push the button and send it on, send it on, send it on...

This, in 2010, is what democracy looks like. No posters, no marching, no blue jeans. Democracy in pajamas. Action, when it happens, is just a squeak. Action is awkward. E-mail is convenient.

If there is ever an award for courage

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and foresight in this confusing time, please let it go to Dr. John Covington, the relatively new superintendent of the Kansas City, Mo., school system. Dr. Covington arrived in a crisis, having found the school system bleeding money and students, and spent five months in deep study, emerging with a plan for a “right-size” system. The plan shuts down nearly half the schools, but the School Board hopes it will result in better education, sooner rather than later, for the city’s mostly poor, mostly black students.

This, for the K.C. schools, is what democracy looks like. Longer bus rides to, we hope, better schools. Maybe, in the long run, the resurgence of the neighborhood one-room schools where a handful of siblings and neighbors in grades one through eight learned together.

Anyone interested in the fate of America’s mid-sized cities should be immersed in study of the City of Jazz, BBQ and Beyond. Well-intentioned people have struggled for decades around the future of their schools, especially the racial integration.

Some called the Boards of Education incompetent, or in denial but the school boards tried neighborhood solutions, built magnet schools, sued to force bussing across city lines and even state lines. Nothing stopped the flow of privileged kids away from the city or, if they were in the city, into private schools and charter schools.

In the last ten years, 18,000 gone, leaving 17,400.

Half the students gone means half the buildings redundant, and if we were prog-

DISPATCHES MOST COURAGEOUS AND MOST COWARDLY DEMS. Of the 34 House Democrats who voted against the Senate healthcare bill on Sunday night, March 21, there really weren’t that many surprises. The more conservative members of the Blue Dog Coalition — the ones who are most likely to be found opposing other Democratic bigticket items — make up the bulk of the no votes.

But not all of the Democrats who voted against reform come from Republican-friendly districts or face tough opposition in November. Several of them actually come from solidly Democratic urban districts. And not every Democrat who voted yes hails from a safe seat.

The chart below seeks to identify the 10 most courageous and the 10 most cowardly healthcare votes from House Democrats. The formula is simple: The courageous list is composed of pro-reform Democrats from districts with the least Democratic-friendly partisan vote index (PVI) ratings (which measure a district’s partisan tendencies). The cowardly list is of anti-reform Democrats from the most Democratic-friendly districts. (An explanation of PVI ratings can be found at swingstateproject.com.)

Alabama’s Artur Davis has the most Democratic-leaning district of any no vote. His 7th District gave Barack Obama nearly 73% of the vote in 2008. Davis, who ousted an incumbent Democrat (Earl Hilliard) in a primary in 2002, has spent the last few years as the least liberal member of the Congressional Black Caucus. But his departures from the party line have intensified this year as he runs for governor of Alabama — a much tougher task than running in his safely Democratic district. Whether voting no will help him with his state’s electorate remains to be seen.

Two other eyebrow-raising no votes were cast by Stephen Lynch, from South Boston, and Dan Lipinski, from Chicago’s Southwest Side. Lipinski was part of Bart Stupak’s antiabortion bloc, but apparently wasn’t satisfied by the compromise that brought Stupak aboard in the end.

Lynch is rumored to be interesting in challenging Scott Brown in the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race and seems to be gambling that Brown’s surprise victory in January was rooted in opposition to healthcare, and not simply Martha Coakley’s inept campaign. Of course, his vote could haunt him in a Democratic primary.

(Interestingly, both Lipinski and Lynch voted against the Senate bill but then voted for the reconciliation fix, potentially leaving no one happy.)

In fairness, it should be noted that Davis, Lynch and Lipinski are the only no-voting Democrats to represent truly safe seats. The others on the “cowardly” list hold seats that could be in danger this fall.

On the flip side, there are some Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who were willing to take a real political risk by voting yes.

North Dakota’s Earl Pomeroy and South Carolina’s John Spratt, in particular, may face the toughest races of their careers this fall because they supported reform on Sunday night. Indiana’s Brad Ellsworth also took a gam-

nosticators we’d say that the promotion of charter schools in all cities could change perfectly healthy systems into struggling systems in the same way. And there are plenty of angry e-mails tracking through the internet saying “Where is the outrage?” If public schools provide the basis for culture, education, democracy, this is Kansas City’s lastditch, messy effort to preserve those also.

Government departments of all stripes are involved with budget this year. One day has been set aside for the General Assembly to do nothing but look at citizen ideas sent over the Internet on how to save. “Ground the Governor’s plane,” says one blogger, “Freeze the salaries of the big wigs,” says another. “State agencies scramble at the end of the fiscal year to spend their General Revene funding. WHY? Because if they don’t SPEND it they won’t GET it the next year! Why not reward agencies for being thrifty, not wasteful?”

“Stop paying for phones, cars, gas, hotel rooms, luncheons and all the other moneysucking things that go on (of course again this is going on in the upper levels of our agencies ...) Obviously it is not the worker bees who are getting those kinds of perks!”

Meanwhile, the Missouri capitol has been buzzing like a beehive this year, with stress over the expenses that human citizens want to put on corporate citizens. Here’s a good one: More tax on agri-chemicals.

Explanations: Chemical companies pay license fees. Most states ask $150$1,500 per chemical. Our state asks $15.

One senator wants to raise that, and use the funds, over $1.5 million, to make up for the shortfall at the Department of Ag. Testifying in favor? Independent farmers and consumers.

ble; he’s not running for reelection, but he is running to succeed Evan Bayh in the Senate. It probably took less courage for Tennessee’s Bart Gordon, another red district Democrat, to vote yes — he’s retiring this year.

The Democrat who may have taken the biggest leap of faith, however, just missed the cut for the top 10: Colorado’s Betsy Markey, also at R+6 and widely regarded as one of the most vulnerable Democratic freshmen. She was one of the few who switched from a no to a yes.

The Ten Most Courageous (Democrats from GOP-friendly districts who voted yes; member name and each district’s PVI rating are listed) 1. Bart Gordon (Tenn.-06); R+13 2. Earl Pomeroy (N.D.-at-large); R+10 3. Alan Mollohan (W.Va.-01); R+9 4. Chris Carney (Pa.-10 ); R+8 5. Brad Ellsworth (Ind.-08); R+8 6. John Spratt (S.C.-05); R+7 7. Nick Rahall (W.Va.-03); R+6 8. Baron Hill (Ind.-09); R+6

Testifying against? Monsanto, Farm Bureau, the Soybean Association, Missouri Biotech Association (“We stand up for Missouri’s life science industry”), Missouri Agribusiness Association (“We work with the Department of Agriculture”); these are the sons and daughters of the corporate persons. Democracy in 2010.

Missouri has more plant scientists than any other state in the union, said one of the proud testifyers. More independent farmers, too, except for in Texas, but nobody expects the new license fees to pass.

In another part of the capitol, at the same time, there was a rally to end the death penalty. Replacing the death penalty with life sentences would save the state millions on each case in appeals costs, say the promoters. They report that the families of victims do not feel relieved after a state execution, nor is there a sense of closure. And the United States is one of just a few nations that allow executions at all.

The death penalty rally was awkwardly quiet. On the third floor, to make up for their less-prominent position, there was an extremely loud rally in favor of “state sovereignty.” This is a group of geniuses that insist that if there is a US health insurance plan, we’ll opt out. Several of the senators spoke, saying they’re big on state sovereignty “and securing our borders.” Not sure what border a state senator means when he says that ... Kansas? Iowa? Arkansas?

This is what democracy looks like: Messy, loud, awkward, inconvenient. And, sometimes, absurd.

Margot Ford McMillen farms and teaches English at a college in Fulton, Mo. Email: margotmcm@socket.net.

9. Ann Kirkpatrick (Ariz.-01; R+6 10. Allen Boyd (Fla.-02); R+6 The Ten Most Cowardly (Dems from the most Democratic-friendly districts who voted no; member name and each district’s PVI rating are listed) 1. Artur Davis (Ala.-07); D+18 2. Stephen Lynch (Mass.-09); D+11 3. Dan Lipinski (Ill.-03); D+11 4. John Barrow (Ga.-12); D+1 5. John Adler (N.J.-03); R+1 6. Larry Kissell (N.C.-08); R+2 7. Mike Arcuri (N.Y.-24); R+2 8. Mike McMahon (N.Y.-13); R+4 9. Glenn Nye (Va.-02); R+5 10. Collin Peterson (Minn.-07); R+5 — David Jarman is a Seattle writer. This appeared at Salon.com.

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CONNIE SCHULTZ Renee was 19 when she married the 20year-old tower of a man with a way about him that made her swoon.

Job or No Job, He’s Still Her Hero n her husband’s last day on the job, Renee Spencer sent me the kind of e-mail that could have come from a devoted spouse living just about anywhere in America.

I do not know Renee, but that didn’t matter. She is a blue-collar worker’s wife in Ashtabula, Ohio, reaching out to another wife, whose working-class roots run deep in that same small town.

Renee was 19 when she married the 20-year-old tower of a man with a way about him that made her swoon. Nearly three decades later, she still adores Ed, but she worries he no longer can see the reasons.

“After 33 years of waking up with a job to do, tomorrow he will be lost,” she

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wrote. “The pride of this hard-working man is that he put food on the table, clothes on his family’s backs, put two kids through college and raised them to be awesome individuals. He sees his value in the pain in 50% of his joints from years of walking concrete floors and working in coolers/freezers. He sees his value in every callus that his hands have earned.

“What I hope he comes to see is that his value is in his wonderful blue eyes that say ‘I love you’ even when his lips don’t. I hope he sees his value in the fact that he is, and will always be, both his kids’ and my hero.”

Ed was 16 when he got a union card and his first grocery job. Over the years, he worked his way up from bagger to dairy manager. In 2006, when his job at an Ashtabula grocery was about to evaporate, John Zagara called Ed to ask him to work at a former Tops grocery on Cleveland’s east side. It was the first time Ed ever felt courted.

“John made it sound like the question was: Is he a good enough employer for me to work for?” Ed said. “I’d never met an employer like that.”

Zagara, a third-generation grocer, restored 40-hour workweeks for Tops’ former full-time employees and promised the union workers they would keep their current wages at the renamed Zagara’s Marketplace.

“Some didn’t believe me at first,” Zagara said. “We could have cut their wages, but you don’t do that to people. We had to build up morale.”

It was Zagara’s second grocery, and

just as it was starting to take off, the economy imploded.

“We lost our footing,” Zagara said. “If the recession hadn’t hit, we would have made it.”

“John tried to make it work; he really did,” Ed said. “We knew there was a chance he would have to sell the store. We knew jobs could be lost.”

After Zagara told Ed he’d agreed to sell the store to another local chain, Ed waited until long after dinner to tell Renee.

She had come home with news of her first bonus from the J.C. Penney store where she works part time.

“She was so happy. I didn’t want to spoil it for her,” Ed said. But Renee knows her husband. She finally turned to him and said, “OK. What’s wrong?”

Zagara met with each of the 75 employees who would lose their jobs. “It was hard,” he said softly, his voice breaking, “but it was the right way to do it.”

Ed Spencer was luckier than most. He had a choice, but it was a hard one.

Zagara offered him a job at his other store, but it wouldn’t include the overtime that used to compensate for the hourlong drive and evening hours. The new job would add another 20 minutes each way, too, and he’d already totaled his car once on the drive through Snowbelt country.

Ed also knew his body was wearing down. At 49, he has had knee surgery and is scheduled for shoulder surgery next week. He regularly visits a chiropractor for his back.

“You’ve provided for us all these years,” his son Tim said. “You put us

Wyoming Turbine Tax is Good for Wind Power

By JONATHAN THOMPSON yoming has some of the world’s best winds, as anyone knows who’s battled with wind-whipped tractor-trailers along I-80. So it’s no surprise that wind turbines have been sprouting in the state’s wideopen spaces at a rapid rate, upping its total wind-power-generating capacity by more than 30% in just one year. Wyoming is also the nation’s principal energy colony: It’s the leading coal producer in the United States and ranks in the top three states for natural gas production.

Yet Wyoming hasn’t exactly welcomed wind power with open arms.

The state showed its green bona fides by banning wind farms from prime sage grouse areas, putting about half of the state’s best winds off-limits. Then it repealed its sales tax exemption for turbines, while some of its most prominent public officials blasted the industry for running roughshod over Wyoming’s wild lands and wildlife. Now, the governor has just signed a bill to tax energy from wind farms, and the turbine pushers are in a frenzy of worry.

They’re even mimicking their colleagues in the oil and gas industry, saying the tax might chase them out of the state.

But the wind tax could be the best thing that ever happened to wind in Wyoming.

In case you hadn’t been paying attention, Wyoming is run by the fossil fuel industry.

That’s not just because of a lot of industry lobbying, or because oil and gas finances most of the state’s campaigns, or even because quite a few Wyoming politicians have worked in the oil, gas or coal industry at one time or another.

It’s because the state’s coffers are as dependent on fossil fuel tax revenues as a baby is on its mother’s breast.

In any given year, the gas and oil industry in Wyoming contributes more than $1.5 billion to state and local government budgets through severance taxes, royalties, sales and use taxes and property taxes. Coal producers add another $800 million or more annually. Those are direct payments and don’t include the tens of thousands of jobs that the fossil fuel industry brings to the state — the coal mines alone employ some 18,000 people at an average salary of $65,000.

Meanwhile, the wind industry contributed just $3.8 million in property taxes this year, in addition to a bit for state land leases. (The sales tax ex-

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emption remains in effect until the end of this year.)

So when Wyoming seems to be picking on wind even as it kowtows to fossil fuels, it’s because of practical, not ideological, considerations. That explains why, when the state moved to protect sage grouse “core areas” in hopes of avoiding an Endangered Species Act listing for the bird, it carefully drew the lines so as to leave the oil and gas hotspots free from regulation.

State officials readily admit that the core areas were drawn to keep the cash flowing and the roughnecks working. Meanwhile, many of the windy sweet spots were overlain with core areas, putting them off-limits to turbines.

The proposed wind tax, which breezed through the Legislature, levies a modest $1-permegawatt-hour on turbines. At current levels of wind-power generation, it would generate $5 million or so in annual revenue. That could easily double or triple in just a few years; the Power Company of Wyoming’s proposed wind farm near Rawlins could — by itself — triple the state’s wind-generating capacity. Wind will never generate as much money for the state as oil and gas and coal, but then wind isn’t going to run out, either, or be made obsolete by climatechange concerns. The wind tax is a reliable, long-term investment.

Even better, though, it puts wind power in the same category as fossil fuels in Wyoming, making it subject to the state’s unofficial motto: “Bring on your energy projects, so we can tax the hell out of them.” When those turbines start adding some money to Wyoming’s schools and other state programs, people are more likely to see them in a favorable light. Or, at least — as they’ve done with oil and gas — they’ll be more likely to ignore their impacts.

My advice to the wind-industry folks who are in a tizzy over this tax? Relax. It may make the economics tougher when it comes to building a wind farm, but it could soften the political opposition to turbines, which seems to grow daily. And the “we’ll go somewhere else if you tax us” rhetoric that you stole from your oil and gas counterparts? Lighten up, please. We need wind power, not hot air.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the magazine’s editor in Paonia, Colo.

6 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

through college. You don’t need to be throwing boxes around anymore.”

Ed had put in the required 30 years with Local 880 of the Food and Commercial Workers union to trigger his pension.

It’d be less money, but he still would earn extra cash working as a high-school umpire. And he’d find another job.

“Renee and I talked about it a lot,” Ed said. “She said it was up to me.”

On a wintry day in mid-February, Ed sent Renee a text message: “Last day March 14.”

She responded: “Then you get a new start March 15.”

Ed’s not so sure.

“I was raised to believe you do what you have to do,” he told me. “I’m a man who has to work.”

He said potential employers look at his résumé and think he’s not qualified for the kind of job he used to do.

“These days, you need a college degree,” he said. “You need a piece of paper that says you can do what I did without one for 33 years.”

Ed laughed at that.

But only a little.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House, Life Happens and ... and His Lovely Wife. She is a featured contributor in a recently released book by Bloomsbury, The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union”. Email cschultz@plaind.com. See her past columns at www.creators.com.

Raw Deals for Family Farmers

By JIM VAN DER POL he recent Supreme Court decision allowing virtually unlimited corporate spending in our elections is sure to accelerate some trends already in place. The government, which already serves as a corporate handmaiden and enabler through its regulatory agencies, is apt to become even more so. And that does not bode well for local food systems.

Raw milk sales are the current case in point. Issues surrounding milk are a bit remote to most of us here on the prairie, as traditional dairy is located to the east for the most part. This is not because of any unsuitability of our geography for the milking of cows. Indeed, there is a 2500 cow dairy just ten miles north west of my farm, and a 6000 cow establishment eight miles straight north. Neither of these places would sell me a bottle of milk, even assuming I was foolish enough to want it. There is also a 5200 sow hog establishment four miles to the east. We are a sacrifice zone here. A decade ago, the politicians in St Paul, in cahoots with the grabby industry booster types that are to be found everywhere, decided that since we along the “I-29 corridor” in western Minnesota were lightly populated, attempts would be made to site huge livestock establishments here, thus minimizing the legal hassles apt to be encountered elsewhere. Informal agreements were reached with both of the Dakotas, and here we are. They have won the battle. A few of us still fight the war.

And, as always, since we are few in numbers and weak, we need to choose our battles carefully. Raw milk is the first issue, and there is no doubt at all that it will be followed in no particular order, by animal identification (NAIS) and irradiation of meat. Our farm, for instance, would suffer additional cost if NAIS were implemented because the system would force us to identify every animal, passing the cost on to our customers, while our big “neighbor” to the east would be able to get by with a single premises identification. Irradiation of meat will be imposed on all small processors as soon as the conventional meat industry fails spectacularly a few more times, sickening and killing with dirty meat. Irradiation will then be seen as a general one size fits all solution, small processors will close, and the demise of hundreds or thousands of small meat marketing efforts such as ours will be mourned by a chorus of the same sanctimonious politicians that brought it on. Big Meat will be delighted.

What all of us who are being or will be impacted by these actions have to do is to begin to think very carefully of boundaries. We must think of what we will and will not do in terms of obeying laws. This is a matter of conviction and action, and a situation where each of us will need to be very sure of what our innermost beliefs and values will allow. Some of us will decide these things differently than others, and we are going to need to exert all the tolerance we can muster, right within our own groups. Defiance of government is never to be taken lightly. There are always consequences, often severe. On the other hand, it does seem that defiance of government is the only thing that ever moves the government.

We are weak, as I said before, with virtually no money, and we are few in numbers. What we do have going for us though, is the revulsion many American citizens feel toward their own government. The ongoing spectacle of a Senate that simply will not do anything useful coupled with a Supreme Court that enables the richest and most powerful organizations ever to populate the earth at the expense of the millions of ordinary citizens it ought to be protecting is turning people in their thinking. Most people simply cannot figure out why they should not be able to buy a glass of milk from a farmer. When it is explained to them that they can’t beContinued on next page

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GENE LYONS Remember when accounting was a respectable profession? No more.

They’re buccaneers today.

It’s Time for Wall St. to Pay We need accountability — as in, jail time where warranted — for those who created the financial disaster. lmost everybody’s got their noses out of joint these days — and no wonder. If there’s a significant American institution that hasn’t failed in its fundamental public responsibility over the past decade, it’d be hard to identify.

Writing in Time, Christopher Hayes puts it succinctly: “Nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it’s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy

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DAVID SIROTA Democrats are now preposterously selling giveaways to insurance and pharmaceutical executives as a middle-class agenda.

What’s the Matter with Democrats? ver since Thomas Frank published his book What’s the Matter With Kansas? Democrats have sought a political strategy to match the GOP’s. The health care bill proves they’ve found one.

Whereas Frank highlighted Republicans’ sleight-of-hand success portraying millionaire tax cuts as gifts to the working class, Democrats are now preposterously selling giveaways to insurance and pharmaceutical executives as a middle-class agenda. Same formula, same fat cat beneficiaries, same bleating sheeple herded to

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Raw Deals ...

Continued from preceding page cause the government says they can’t, they recognize the situation and a little voice inside many of them says: “Drink it anyway”.

We Americans are thoroughly under corporate control and many of us long not to be, without really even knowing what it is that bothers us. Understanding that the government is too often acting as the corporation in disguise is an easy step for many people.

I am no anarchist. I’m not even a libertarian. I have always been and still am a believer in the role of government, and I would not for that reason encourage anyone to defiance. I think the government has an important role in maintaining order, in defending the people and their communities against huge powerful interests,

the commanding heights of our meritocratic order.”

Me, I blame the combination of runaway baseball salaries, the “talented and gifted” movement in schools, and the tyranny of SAT scores. I’m only half-joking.

Once free agency drove even an average third baseman’s pay into the seven-figure range formerly reserved for tycoons who owned major industries or medium-size Midwestern states, practically everybody with SAT scores over 1,400 figured they deserved to earn as much as Aramis Ramirez.

The differences being that quality third basemen are a lot rarer than Ivy League MBAs, and are publicly and relentlessly evaluated. Steroids or no steroids, one bad season and they’re replaced by a 22-year-old from the Dominican Republic.

That’s one of the things keeping us fans hanging on.

Not so in the corporate world. As recently as 2008, the geniuses running Wall Street investment banks bankrupted their companies and came perilously close to collapsing the world financial system. And what happened? A few CEOs departed via “golden parachute,” but most executives stayed shamelessly in place, profited from multibillion-dollar TARP bailouts and then began awarding each other obscene bonuses almost before the smoke cleared.

Meanwhile, a substantial part of a generation’s retirement savings vanished into thin air. Had the Bush administration succeeded in “privatizing” Social Security back in 2005, the damage could not have been worse.

Over time, American institutions appear to be growing steadily less account-

able. Hayes cites the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, which strikes me as a red herring. Yes, the bishops averted their eyes, placing the putative well-being of the church above children. Yes, ecclesiastical lectures on sexual sin are a bit harder to take. But the church has been hierarchical, secretive and self-protective since forever.

Moreover, as recent developments in Ireland and Germany show, the problem is international.

More to the point, “look at CEO pay,” Hayes urges. “In 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of average CEO pay to average wage was about 35 to 1. By 2007 it was 275 to 1.” In comparison, the ratio remains approximately 20 to 1 in most European countries; roughly 11 to 1 in Japan. Yet people complain about labor unions.

Hayes cites Nell Minow, an expert in corporate governance nicknamed “The CEO Killer” by Fortune magazine, to the effect that all many executives know how to do is “manipulate the levers of governance and devise ingenious methods of guaranteeing themselves windfalls regardless of their company’s performance.” The unvarying defense of the latest Wall Street bonuses, of course, is that the talented and gifted recipients might otherwise change teams. Why, perish the thought.

Only recently, reporters have begun catching up with the bankruptcy examiner’s report on the failure of Lehman Brothers investment bank, the precipitating event in the 2008 financial crisis. According to law professor and former white-collar prosecutor Peter J. Henning, writing in the New York Times’ DealBook blog, the 2,000-page document “discusses

some accounting gimmicks that are eerily reminiscent of how Enron tried to prop up its balance sheet back in 2001 before it collapsed.”

And for which, it will be recalled, a number of Enron executives went to prison. The details can be dauntingly complex. But what they amounted to were a series of short-term accounting tricks designed to make the bank’s financial health appear robust as it “teetered on the brink of ruin.”

The examiner’s report calls CEO Richard Fuld “grossly negligent” at minimum, and reserves even harsher terms for Lehman’s accounting firm, Ernst & Young.

Remember when accounting was a respectable profession? No more. They’re buccaneers today.

The basic gimmick was called a “Repo 105,” moving bad real estate-based assets off the books by using them as collateral for short-term loans just long enough to file quarterly reports, then unwinding the deals as quickly as overnight.

It’s as if your brother-in-law assumed your debts and deeded you his assets overnight so you could qualify for a bank loan, then took them back. Except Lehman was doing it to the tune of $50 billion a pop. You and your brother-in-law would go to prison for that, and so should somebody at Lehman Brothers. Hopefully, somebody with a brilliant academic record and impeccable social credentials, so the rest of them start paying attention.

the slaughterhouse. The only difference is the Rube Goldberg contraption that Democrats are using to tend the flock.

First, their leaders campaign on pledges to create a government insurer (a “public option”) that will compete with private health corporations. Once elected, though, Democrats propose simply subsidizing those corporations, which are (not coincidentally) filling Democratic coffers.

Justifying the reversal, Democrats claim the subsidies will at least help some citizens try to afford the private insurance they’ll be forced to buy — all while insisting Congress suddenly lacks the votes for a public option.

Despite lawmakers’ refusal to hold votes verifying that assertion, liberal groups obediently follow orders to back the bill, their obsequious leaders fearing scorn from Democratic insiders and moneymen. Specifically, MoveOn, unions and “progressive” non-profits threaten retribution against lawmakers who consider voting against the bill because it doesn’t include a public option. The threats fly even though these congresspeople would be respecting their previous public-option ultimatums — ultimatums originally supported by many of the same groups now demanding retreat.

Soon it’s on to false choices. Democrats tell their base that any bill is better than no bill, even one making things

worse, and that if this particular legislation doesn’t pass, Republicans will win the upcoming election — as if signing a blank check to insurance and drug companies couldn’t seal that fate. They tell everyone else that “realistically” this is the “last chance” for reform, expecting We the Sheeple to forget that those spewing the do-or-die warnings control the legislative calendar and could immediately try again.

Predictably, the fear-mongering prompts left-leaning Establishment pundits to bless the bill, giving Democratic activists concise-yet-mindless conversation-enders for why everyone should shut up and fall in line (“Krugman supports it!”). Such bumper-sticker mottos are then demagogued by Democratic media bobbleheads and their sycophants, who dishonestly imply that the bill’s progressive opponents 1) secretly aim to aid the far right and/or 2) actually hope more Americans die for lack of health care. In the process, the legislation’s sellouts are lambasted as the exclusive fault of Republicans, not Democrats and their congressional majorities.

Earth sufficiently scorched, President Obama then barnstorms the country, calling the bill a victory for “ordinary working folks” over the same corporations he is privately promising to enrich. The insurance industry, of course, airs token ads to buttress Obama’s “victory” charade — at the

same time its lobbyists are, according to Politico, celebrating with chants of “we win!”

By design, pro-public-option outfits like Firedoglake and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee end up depicted as voices of the minority, even as they champion an initiative that polls show the majority of voters support. Meanwhile, telling questions hang: If this represents victory over special interests, why is Politico reporting that “drug industry lobbyists have huddled with Democratic staffers” to help pass the bill? How is the legislation a first step to reform, as proponents argue, if it financially and politically strengthens insurance and drug companies opposing true change? And what prevents those companies from continuing to increase prices?

These queries go unaddressed — and often unasked. Why? Because their answers threaten to expose the robbery in progress, circumvent the “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” contemplation and raise the most uncomfortable question of all: What’s the matter with Democrats?

Gene Lyons of Little Rockis co-author of The Hunting of the President [St. Martin’s Press, 2000]. Email eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

David Sirota is author of the best-selling books Hostile Takeover (2006) and The Uprising (2008). He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

and to serve as an organizing principle when people want to use it to do what they cannot do alone, such as obtaining reasonable medical care without losing their life savings. That it does not do these things does not excuse me from expecting it to do better and from working to make it do better. For our farm and business, we will work within the system to the maximum extent we can and put off any drastic decisions about disobedience until we are forced into them. We are working diligently to make sure our customers understand what is probably going to be coming and that they have some power within the system to protect what has become for many of them an important and vital connection to the land.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. This appeared in Farming magazine.

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FORECLOSURE CRISIS PERSISTS Families Eagerly Await ‘Cramdowns’

By ROGER BYBEE an we finally stop worrying about the long-term devastation from high unemployment projected for up to seven more years, the large numbers of home foreclosures, and the millions of families anxious about being tossed out on the street?

After all, the US economy grew at an impressive 5.9% annual clip in the fourth quarter of 2009. Profits are up. Corporate savings are up. But as the saying goes, statistics can be tortured into confessing just about anything.

Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, incisively analyzes what he properly calls the hollow, unproductive economic activity that underlies this “sham recovery.”

Still, leading Democrats can be heard trying to make the most out of rapidly declining job losses. Yes, there has been a huge improvement over the last miserable months created by the deregulatory approach of George W. Bush (and his predecessor) that created the Wall Street meltdown. But a reduction in job losses is hardly an inspiring campaign theme for the 2010 midterms.

Worse, complacency about the sham recovery could inhibit the kind of federal action needed to create public jobs on a mass scale and force banks to unfreeze credit to small businesses, and the development of effective federal assistance programs the foreclosure crisis is almost certain to intensify even further in the coming months.

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Foreclosure Crisis Still Building The scope of the foreclosure problem is already much more massive than is commonly understood, and is likely to metastasize in the coming months.

• The daily pace of foreclosures is now occurring at ten times the number during the Great Depression, according to the calculations of Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs executive and author of It Takes A Pillage: Bailouts, Bonuses and Backroom Deals.

• Across America, “One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure,” warns Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

• “[T]the number of foreclosed homes in the US last

Judicial ...

Continued from page one able to the public. That same populist streak has kept judicial elections alive (in at least some form) in 38 states.

In the years since White, Justice O’Connor has on several occasions expressed regret about her decision in White and has devoted a good portion of her retirement career to speaking out against judicial elections – most recently in Maryland, where she appeared before the General Assembly in support of the state Attorney General’s call for the abolition of judicial elections. Now after Citizens United, Justice Ginsburg has lent her voice to the cause for abolishing judicial elections as well. But it’s unlikely that Justice O’Connor and Ginsburg will have success in Maryland or in any other state that has been electing its judges for more than 100 years.

There is a real constitutional crisis in the judiciary of some states (and no, Justice Roberts, it’s not the judicial pay scale).

More and more, state courts are losing the confidence of the public. The single largest contributor to judicial elections is the Chamber of Commerce and other probusiness groups. Business advocates argue that this is to counter the influence trial judges had in the 1980s, when they were the largest contributors to judicial campaigns. Whatever the history, the reality is that there are strong, well-financed forces favorable to business and to conservative political principles that exert powerful influence over state judicial elections. One would think that the Court would be sensitive to this reality after deciding Caperton v. Massey last term. That’s the case in which the Court ruled that it was a violation of due process for a state supreme court judge in West Virginia to hear a case in which the CEO of the coal

year increased to a record 2.8 million, a 21% rise over 2008 and 120% over 2007, according to a new report from Irvine (Calif.)-based RealtyTrac,” reported BusinessWeek.

Analysts increasingly attribute the current wave of foreclosures to continuing high levels of unemployment. In the words of attorney David Lebowitz, who represents homeowners in the hard-hit industrial city of Kenosha, Wis., “We will not start seeing improvement in foreclosure rates until we see improvement in the employment picture.”

Another major factor is healthcare cost burdens, which are a factor in almost half of all foreclosures. A 2008 study, called “Get Sick, Get Out,” led by Christopher T. Robertson of Harvard Law School, concluded that “half of all foreclosures have medical causes, and we estimate that medical crises put 1.5 million Americans in jeopardy of losing their homes last year.”

If the Obama healthcare bill passes, one of its most helpful provisions — the prohibition on preexisting conditions — will not provide much aid to hard-pressed families.

It turns out that the pre-existing conditions ban will apply only to the young for the next four years, and penalties for insurers violating this rule are disturbingly weak, as documentarian Michael Moore, director of SiCKO, which examined US healthcare, has noted on MSNBC’s Countdown.

The Obama administration’s programs to fight foreclosure have been largely ineffectual. One key provision sought by Obama — giving bankruptcy judges the power to “cramdown” the amount of principal owed by homeowners — was killed thanks to the efforts of conservative Democrats feeling more compassion for banks than families about to lose their homes. One of them was Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), whose number one contributor throughout his career was Goldman Sachs.

Banks ‘Own the Place’ The move prompted Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin to remark, “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill.

And they frankly own the place.”

Neither of two key Obama administration plans have been even minimally effective in helping families to stay in their homes, reports the Huffington Post’s Shahin Nasiripour. Clearly, the cram-down feature would have helped in making both programs more successful. As Nasiripour reports, not a single homeowner has been rescued by one program: “Nearly a year after the Obama administration announced a plan to help up to 1.5 million struggling homeowners modify their second mortgages, not a single homeowner has gotten any assistance.

“The program, a part of the administration’s $75 billion anti-foreclosure initiative, was supposed to induce mortgage servicers to coordinate payment reductions on

company defendant had contributed $3 million to ensure the judge’s election. Of course it bears remembering that Caperton was only a 5-4 decision, with the four most conservative justices who comprised most of the majority in Citizens United, in dissent in Caperton.

There are racial consequences to the unfettered role of money and attack ads in judicial elections as well, as black incumbents increasingly face overwhelmingly well-financed opponents, who sometimes draw on racial appeals in their campaigns.

African American Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler of Wisconsin was challenged

The banking industry’s man in DC says banks should be protected instead of consumers

By ANDREW LEONARD ohn Dugan, Comptroller of the Currency, runs the US agency primarily responsibly for regulating the nation’s largest banks.

On Wednesday, March 17, he made an appearance at an American Banker’s Association conference, and took the opportunity to complain about the provisions made for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency in Senator Dodd’s newly unveiled financial regulatory reform bill.

From the Financial Times: “‘In every case consumer protection has the edge and will trump safety and soundness and I think that is backwards,’ said John Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, at an American Bankers Association conference.

“Mr. Dugan, whose office regulates national banks, said a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed in Mr Dodd’s financial regulation bill, which was published on Monday and is to be revised next week, was too strong.”

The reference to “safety and soundness” signals a regulatory

8 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and activist with a blog at (zmag.org/zspace/rogerdbybee). He is a contributor to (inthesetimes.com/working/). Email winterbybee@earthlink.net

last year by an opponent whose supporters used campaign ads putting Butler’s face next to that of a black child molester, with the accusation that Butler had “found a loophole” to set the molester free. Justice Butler lost his seat.

The only way to bring some measure of sanity to runaway state judicial elections is for states to push for publicly financed elections — an initiative that’s been tried with some success in North Carolina, and has been adopted in New Mexico, Wisconsin and most recently in West Virginia after Caperton. States should also create judicial campaign conduct committees –

How Not to Learn from a Financial Crisis

J

additional mortgages when the first mortgage is modified under the administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program.

“But it’s never gotten off the ground.”

Another program has provided real help to only onethird of homeowners in trouble, rather than the 75% expected, Nisiripour found: “Only about a third of the homeowners who have successfully completed the trial period of the Obama administration’s mortgage modification program have been offered permanent relief, according to new federal data obtained by the Huffington Post.

“The conversion rate — about 33% — is woefully short of what the Treasury Department had forecast.

Treasury thought the rate would be “ranging up to 75%,” Herbert M. Allison Jr., assistant secretary for financial stability, told the Congressional Oversight Panel in October.

“The other two-thirds of homeowners who have gone through the trial program and made the necessary payments remain in limbo. Some of those homeowners — more than 350,000 of them — will ultimately lose out on the kind of relief the administration has repeatedly promised: averting foreclosure through lower monthly payments …”

The weakness of the anti-foreclosure programs has angered Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), chairman of House Oversight’s Domestic Policy subcommittee, who argued that the Treasury Department isn’t displaying nearly as much concern to homeowners as it does to Wall Street.

“Treasury has been very slow to use the authority provided by Congress ... to help keep homeowners in their homes. And this contrasts with the emergency with which both [the Bush and Obama] administrations have worked to bail out the large financial institutions.”

Kucinich states that only one effective solution remains, and that is a government role in forcing lenders to take reductions in the principal that they are demanding.

In other words, only “cramdowns” will avert an even larger foreclosure crisis: “I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that the only way to accelerate the program and also provide adequate incentives for homeowners who sacrifice to stay in their own homes is through permanent, locally-tailored, unconditional reductions in mortgage principal.”

While a sufficient number of Senate Dems earlier blocked the cram-down procedure under which lenders could be forced to sacrifice part of the principal, these conservative Democrats will come under severe new pressures if foreclosures continue — and as the November mid-term elections draw near.

made up of respected citizens who comment on the conduct of candidates for judicial office based on a voluntary code that requires civility, a pledge to avoid misrepresentations and scurrilous attacks on opponents. (Disclosure: I helped form and serve on such a Committee in Maryland.)

In the absence of these measures, many state courts — aided by unwise decisions from the Supreme Court — will come closer and closer to a crisis of legitimacy.

Sherrilyn Ifill is professor of law at the University of Maryland School of Law. This first appeared at ConcurringOpinions.com and Salon.com.

approach that focuses primarily on making sure that banks are well-capitalized and healthy, rather than on whether what they might be doing is bad for consumers.

The FT tells us that Dugan is an “influential regulator.” That may be so, but not in any way that serves the interests of the current administration or anyone who believes banks need to be more tightly overseen. Dugan, as amply documented in a terrific profile by Zach Carter in The Nation Jan. 4, “The Master of Disaster,” has long been one of the banking industry’s most powerful advocates in Washington. In between government stints for both Bush presidencies, he sandwiched an eight-year-stint worked as lobbyist for the financial industry — the American Banking Association was one of this clients.

Carter reports that a 1991 study overseen by Dugan, “Modernizing the Financial System: Recommendations for Safer, More Competitive Banks,” laid the groundwork for a decade of financial system deregulation. Under his tenure, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has consistently defended banks against consumer interests or states wishing to crack down on abuses such as predatory lending. .

Dugan’s opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is the default banking industry position. Dugan’s term ends in August. Why not ignore him now, and replace him with Elizabeth Warren?

Andrew Leonard is a writer who writes the column “How the World Works” at Salon.com, where this originally appeared.

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ARE WE ON THE ROAD TO

Dangerous Visions for Desperate Times SOCIALISM?

By MARK MANSPERGER

By BOB BURNETT he good ship USA is sailing through an iceberg-laden sea, severely damaged and taking in water. Beset by an array of daunting problems, including a failed economy and global climate change, Americans have two choices. We can ignore how bad our situation is or we can fight to save our democracy. For those of you who feel like taking action, here are ten dangerous visions.

1. Reform campaign finances. The financial crisis was driven

by Wall Street greed and a lax regulatory environment fueled by political payoffs. Elizabeth Warren, chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, observed: “The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this mess.

They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And now they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis.” We can’t repair our failed system until we get big money out of the political process. The first step is a constitutional amendment prohibiting private contributions to political campaigns. This change would fund campaigns with public monies, drastically restrict use of television advertisements, and prohibit “independent expenditures” in all forms.

2. Tax the rich. Since the election of Ronald Reagan, there has been a massive shift of America’s wealth from the lower and middle classes to the privileged few. Last year the S&P 500 CEOs averaged 344 times the pay of an average worker, but during the last decade real worker income decreased. This situation is both unfair and inefficient; it’s produced an unsustainable American economy based on debt-financed consumption. The solution is a massive redistribution of income.

We must tax the upper class; reinstate the income tax rates that were in place before Reagan and close tax loopholes that favor the wealthy.

3. End monopoly capitalism. The Wall Street bailouts indicated the need to break up America’s biggest banks — which, at the time, were judged to be too big to fail, thereby enhancing their monopoly status. These banks should be divided into separate companies, as should behemoths in other industries such as energy, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. The absence of a level playing field discourages innovation, disadvantages entrepreneurs, inflates prices, and penalizes workers and consumers.

4. Tax carbon. America needs to abandon use of carbonbased fuels. Using them has disastrous environmental consequences and petroleum imports provide money to dictators who sponsor terrorism. Unrealistically low prices for carbon fuels inhibit the development of clean technologies. We must dramatically increase taxes on all forms of carbon-based fuels 5. Reduce military spending. America can no longer afford to be the world’s police force — we have troops in 150 countries in over 1,000 military installations. It’s time for nation building at home. The funds that bloat the DOD budget should be used to rebuild America.

6. Increase education funding. We are not training the workforce we need to compete with the European Union, China and India. We have to rebuild schools, pay teachers better salaries, increase school hours, and demand results.

7. Expand the social safety net. It makes no sense to improve schools without simultaneously focusing on measures that strengthen families: healthcare, housing, public transportation, daycare, and other essential systems. The Federal government needs to stop providing corporate welfare and instead focus on support for working families.

8. End communication monopolies. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, America has seen an alarming concentration of ownership of all forms of communication. This has negatively impacted American culture and diminished the quality of national discourse. A recent example was the sponsorship of the Tea Party “movement” by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Monopolies in general need to be dispersed, but particular attention should be paid to communication giants.

9. Tax Beef. “You are what you eat.” The US is the world’s largest beef consumer and producer, but beef is unhealthy and an inefficient source of protein. Moreover, beef production is a leading cause of environmental destruction. Americans need to change their eating habits. The place to start is by taxing beef.

10. Change the composition of the Senate. During the summer of 2009, healthcare legislation bogged down in the Senate Finance committee chaired by Montana Senator Max Baucus. In a futile effort to develop bipartisan legislation, Baucus convened a subcommittee of three Democrats and three Republicans, the Gang of Six — the six small states represented had a combined population of 8.4 million, 2.7% of the US population. The Gang of Six episode was a vivid reminder that the composition of the US Senate — two senators per state regardless of size — is a historical anachronism. There needs to be a constitutional amendment that allocates the 100 senators by population rather than by state.

America teeters on the edge of ruin. Solving our dire problems requires a drastic reform of the entire system. What I’ve proposed are only a few of the changes needed to steer the good ship USA into safe harbor.

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Bob Burnett is a Berkeley, Calif., writer and retired Silicon Valley executive. Email bobburnett@comcast.net.

he health care debate and other recent political controversies have stirred up the issue of which direction is best for our country to take.

Of particular concern among many citizens is a perceived movement away from capitalism toward socialism. This apprehension is partially a vestige of the Cold War era in which for nearly 50 years we faced down an adversary we equated with socialism and communism.

The former Soviet Union, however, was no more the perfect representative of socialism than modernday Brazil is the ideal representative of capitalism. Instead, the USSR was just one rather misguided and brutal variant of the socialistic socioeconomic ideology.

Capitalism is characterized by free enterprise, open markets, private property and corporations. Socialism, on the other hand, entails more governmental ownership and management of the means of production and distribution, with less private property.

In reality, most societies are a mix of these two systems. America is closer to the capitalist end of the spectrum, while France, Germany and Great Britain are closer to the socialist. We would have a very long way to go before America could accurately be described as a socialist nation.

Perhaps our concern should not be with what “ism” we are living, but instead to concern ourselves with obtaining the highest quality of life possible.

Isn’t that what really matters?

Socioeconomic “isms” are only means to that end, not goals themselves. If one compares nations such as Germany, France, Great Britain and Canada with our country, it can be seen that in many domains we’re second best.

Our rates of crime, poverty, blight and anxiety are significantly greater than the more aesthetic, safe, laidback and nurturing societies of our allies. Yes, we have a bigger economy, but we also have a lower quality of life. Which is more important?

Moreover, let’s take a second look at our private sector. Most businesses fail, many others are poorly run and thousands are outright criminal. Remember Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom and all the rest?

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Confessions of a Social Justice Communist

By DON ROLLINS ommunism: 1. a system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common. 2. political doctrine based on Marxism, seeking the creation of a classless society; 3. system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state. (Webster’s Modern Office Dictionary, 1999) Nazism: the body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the Nazis from 1933-1945, including the totalitarian principle of government, predominance of especially Germanic groups assumed to be racially superior, and supremacy of the fuehrer. (Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, 2010) Social Justice: … action in accordance with the requirements of some law. Whether these laws are grounded in human consensus or societal norms, they are supposed to ensure that all members of a society receive fair treatment … (Sociology Guide: A Students Guide to Sociology, 2010)

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Dear Glenn Beck: Forgive the lengthy quotes and all, but after hearing you give that radio treatise last week about how “social justice” is nothing more than communism and Nazism by another name, I just had to consult the experts to make sure the acid flashbacks weren’t at me again. Once I got that cleared up, I went right to denial: “That man couldn’t be dumber if he cut off his head!” I told myself. How could he say such a thing!

But, much as I’ve been taught to despise you, I’ve always harbored the secret thought that maybe you’re a pretty bright cat, actually looking out for the nation’s good. That sliver of doubt started me thinking that, horror of horrors; maybe I’m one of those dirty communist-Nazis you were talking about. Have I been wrong all these years? Good Lord, how did this happen?

I think it all began when my eighth-grade-educated dad came home from the Big War an FDR Democrat. He gave us all that “I’m not a smart man, but

Unlike governments, corporations don’t have a charter of trying to meet human needs and improve society. Moreover, the more they exert influence on government, the worse governments perform.

Why would we want corporations to be increasingly powerful? They have just driven us to the brink of another great depression.

The primary fault of government in our current economic morass is failing to regulate banks and financial markets well enough. Therefore, government is not only, at most, a secondary cause of this recession the primary cause being our private sector - but it actually has been our lifesaver.

Without a strong and independent government, unfettered capitalism tends toward monopoly, unemployment, rampant inequality, unlimited commercialism, environmental destruction and ultimate collapse.

Numerous and important human needs, such as medicine, care for the elderly, unemployment insurance, education, environmental protection and critical investments in science are frequently unaddressed by free enterprise.

Capitalism is a highly productive system that can unleash peoples’ creative potentials, but it needs strong and abundant regulations in order to be an economic engine that benefits society.

Our problem is not too little reliance on capitalism; it is too much. The 19th century working and living conditions capitalism produced for people prior to the intervention of activists and governments were deplorable!

Moreover, most Americans, contrary to what they may say, don’t really seem eager to experience unrestrained capitalism themselves, which is beset by numerous economic casualties.

Instead, people tend to want, and even expect, a buffer from economic brutality, societal fairness and occasional assistance as they need.

In democracies, government consists of representatives, elected by the people, operating under a charter for improving society. Wall Street and corporations do not.

By far the biggest expenditure of democratic governments is to address human needs. Our goal should not be to belittle government, but to free it from special interests and make it work better for us.

Mark Mansperger is an assistant professor of anthropology and world civilizations at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Email mmansperger@tricity.wsu.edu. This appeared in the Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

I know that poor and hungry ain’t no way to go through life” stuff. I shoulda’ known then that the man was an anarchist. Same with my mom, an office worker at an elementary school; she was always sneaking money to the poor kids. Socialist, was what she was.

Church was part of the problem, too. They told me that Jesus gave a damn about suffering people.

Some line about the poor inheriting the earth and a widow’s penny meaning more than a rich man’s dollar. Yeah, right.

Once on the road of tears that leads straight to Bleeding Heart City, I was one lost pilgrim, Mr. Beck.

I voted, first for Carter, then that evildoer, Mondale.

I was writing “social justice” songs, marching in “social justice” protests and donating to “social justice” organizations. And, as though those sins weren’t scarlet enough, I entered seminary and got myself ordained in one of those vile “social justice” denominations you talked about just last week. I drank the elixir of liberalism; worse yet, I passed it along.

As you can see, I’m standin’ in the need of prayer, sir. I could go on and on, but you’re a busy standard bearer for the American Way with better things to do than hear the confession of a pathetic “social justice” preacher. You’ve opened my eyes to the truth, and I’ll find my way from here. But, Mr. Beck, please know that your war against communist Nazi religion has just gained another foot soldier for truth. This Sunday, I’ll tell my church that no longer will we be helping the family down the street stretch their food stamps; no more kerosene for the guy camping out in the park; and no more crazy stuff like putting a manic-phase bipolar guy on a bus back to his frantic mama. Enough with the “social justice” already. I’ve seen the light. And you’re my beacon.

Yours in the cause, Rev. Don Rollins P.S. I’m just goofin’ on you, Glenn. When I’m done here, I’m going to cut a check to PETA, take a shift at the food pantry, attend a Social Justice Committee meeting at the church and say another prayer for my 2012 presidential dream ticket: Hillary and Al Sharpton.

Peace.

Rev. Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Spartanburg, S.C. Email donlrollins@comcast.net.

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When US Becomes Greece Drivel from the Deficit Hawks

By DEAN BAKER he headlines about Greece’s financial problems have provided a great backdrop to renewed attacks from the deficit hawks on Social Security and Medicare. Never mind that none of it really makes any sense. Not making sense is virtually a prerequisite for being taken seriously in Washington policy debates. This is the reason that the characters who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble dominated debate in the years leading up to the crisis, and still do today.

The deficit hawks tell us that Greece today is where the US will be in 10 years. Yeah, the US and Greek economies are virtually spitting images. In fact, they are so similar people often get them mixed up in discussions.

If we get serious we see that the US and Greece have almost nothing in common. Greece has a small economy that is still largely dependent on tourism and agriculture.

It also has a horribly corrupt government. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that more than 30% of its GDP consists of grey market activity that escapes taxation. Even if this figure is exaggerated, the size of the underground economy is certainly much larger in Greece than in the United States.

Greece also has the huge disadvantage of being tied to the euro. This matters for its crisis because currency devaluation, the most obvious mechanism for restoring international competitiveness, is not open to Greece.

By contrast, in spite of the loss of more than one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1998, the United States remains a manufacturing powerhouse. It’s manufacturing

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sector produced $1.4 trillion in 2007, the last year before the crisis. The United States also has a vibrant high tech sector and has huge agricultural and tourist sectors.

Suppose the deficit hawks’ horror story (dream) came true and investors lost confidence in the United States.

The deficit hawk gang tells us that people will flee the dollar and interest rates will go through the roof.

Does this make sense? Which currency will they opt to hold instead of dollars — euros, yen? As we know, many of the countries in the euro zone have debt burdens that are comparable to those in the United States and Japan’s is actually much larger. If the problem is the debt burden, investors will be going the wrong way in leaving the dollar.

Furthermore, how will these countries feel about a plunging dollar? Will they let the euro rise to be worth two dollars, three dollars? Will the yen be allowed to double in value against the dollar? How many imports will we buy from Europe and Japan if their price doubles or triples to consumers in the United States, which is the direct result of a falling dollar? How much more will we be exporting if the price of US exports falls 50-60 percent?

It is ridiculous to imagine that the governments and central banks of other major countries would allow for the dollar to go into a free fall. Precisely because we are not Greece, but rather the world’s largest economy, a sharp plunge in the value of our currency poses more of a threat to other countries than it does to the United States.

That is why it is absurd to imagine the same sort of crisis that Greece is seeing hitting the United States in any nearterm future scenario.

The same point applies to interest rates. Long-term

interest rates will certainly rise from today’s extraordinarily low levels, but how high do we think they will go if the economy remains weak? The Fed will presumably keep short-term rates low if the unemployment rate stays high.

Will investors prefer to get near zero returns on shortterm money than hold US Treasury bonds at a 4% interest rate? How about a 5% rate? How about a 6% rate?

At some point the gap between the long-term rate and the short-term rate that would be implied is sufficiently large that even a deficit hawk would not try to claim that it is plausible. Higher interest rates are not desirable in a weak economy, but we can live with the sort of interest rates that might plausibly result from any sort of “loss of confidence” that US debt might experience in financial markets.

Of course the real problem is the spin that we may get from a jump in interest rates. Suppose the yield on 10year Treasury bonds rose a full percentage point from its current 3.7% level to 4.7%, a rate that is still below the lowest rates seen in the golden surplus years of the Clinton era. The deficit hawks would be out in force insisting that the financial markets insist that we slash Social Security and Medicare. Given their ability to control public debate, they could win with this line.

So, we have to inoculate the public from deficit hawk mania. These are the folks who mismanaged the economy through a $10 trillion stock bubble and an $8 trillion housing bubble, causing millions to lose their jobs, homes and life’s saving. While they may have impressive credentials, the evidence suggests that they have little understanding of the most fundamental economic facts.

We know that these people don’t like Social Security and Medicare. We also know, that when it comes to the economy, they don’t know what they are talking about.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net). He has a blog, “Beat the Press” (prospect.org/deanbaker). Email baker@cepr.net. This appeared at Truthout.org.

All You Really Need to Know About Banking Reform

By ROBERT BOROSAGE inancial reform, as it is called, shouldn’t be all that complicated.

Break up the banks deemed “too big to fail,” since that offends any possibility of market discipline and puts taxpayers on the hook for future bailouts. Crack down on gambling with other peoples’ money in the financial casino. Give consumers a cop on the beat to protect them from the cons and frauds. Tax the big guys to get our money back. Outlaw compensation schemes that give million dollar incentives to make risky bets.

But, of course, finance is its own world, with its own patois, ethos and interests. And banks and regulators have a strong interest in making this stuff complicated. So the debate turns to the intricacies of trading derivatives on an exchange, resolution authority, credit default swaps, policing “systemic risk.” For most Americans, the eyes glaze over, and they reach for the remote. That leaves legislators free to deal with the banking lobby and the regulators mobilized to protect their interests and turf. With the White House still focused on passing health care, and Finance Committee Chair Senator Dodd replaying a poor man’s version of the bipartisan farce that Max Baucus staged on health care, wasting time in backrooms trying to seduce a couple of reluctant Republicans, it is no surprise that reform isn’t going so well.

How bad is it? The independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency is about to be buried in the Federal Reserve. The only talk of banning naked credit default swaps is in Europe. The market oxymoron — banks that are too big to fail — seems about to be embraced in law. I could go on, but again, I can feel the eyes begin to droop.

So how bad is it? All you really need to know was provided by a report in the March 7 Washington Post business page, entitled “Financial reform bill likely to lose measure to protect Main Street investors.”

Sure enough, when Dodd released the new bill’s language March 15, it dropped the simple “requirement for stock brokers and insurance agents to act in the best interests of their clients.”

This common sense statement passed the House without mention. It was included in Chairman Dodd’s original draft

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language. Then the lobbyists went to work and apparently have convinced the senators that requiring an agent to act in the best interests of his or her client is, well, complicated. So Tomoeh Murakami Tse reports in the Post that instead of a requirement, the new draft will direct the Securities and Exchange Commission to study the varying rules that govern brokers and investment advisors.

Consider this a tribute to Goldman Sachs. You remember Lloyd Blankfein told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Jan. 13 that it was just business as usual for Goldman to create and peddle packages of mortgage-backed securities, lobby for them to be rated AAA, and then make independent bets that the securities would go bust. (Astonished Commission Chair Phil Angelides responded: “It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”)

So at the retail level, your broker — who usually works for a bank or investment house — will have the banks’ interests in mind, not yours. He or she may be encouraged to recommend that you buy the toxic junk in the basement that the bank is trying

10 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

to get rid of. So it would be complicated — worth study, surely — to require your broker to have your best interests in mind.

Yeah, it’s come to that. Reforms prospects are bleak, but not entirely hopeless. One small thing constrains the senators, outside of their individual own sense of decency (which is a dependent variable).

The public is furious at the bank ripoffs and bailouts. Across the spectrum, from conservative to liberal, Democrat, Independent and Republican, vast majorities want a crack down on the banks. Folks are looking for tumbrels and guillotines, not SEC studies.

So the bank lobby has millions of dollars and legions of high dollar lobbyists, including literally dozens of retired legislators, who can buttonhole their former colleagues, as Rep. Massa reveals, in the showers of the House gym. (Giving new meaning to whole notion of naked credit default swaps).

The reform coalition — anchored by Americans for Financial Reform — has 200 organizations, and mobilizes citizens, not money. But even obstructionist Republicans (who provided not one vote for financial reform in the House) and corporate Democrats are nervous about appearing to be too

deep in the pocket of the banks.

So, folks, you don’t have to have a MBA, or be a sophisticated investor to make a difference. You don’t have to learn what a credit default swap is. All you’ve got to use is your common sense.

If the Senate isn’t prepared to give consumers an independent cop on the beat, if it isn’t prepared to break up banks that taxpayers will have to bail out, if it isn’t even willing to require that your stock broker act in your best interests — then raise bloody hell. Take down names and mobilize.

Check out Americans for Financial Reform (ourfinancialsecurity.org). Come to the Campaign for America’s Future (ourfuture.org). We’ll track the debate and provide a chart on who stands with you and who stands with the banks, with links on how to call them.

We’re not likely to get sufficient reform this year. But, if a few legislators pay the penalty for taking the bank lobby money and voting the bank lobby program — things may get a lot simpler next year.

Robert L. Borosage is a founder of the Campaign for America’s Future (ourfuture.org), where this appeared. Email borosage@ourfuture.org.

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Taxpayers Are Getting Nuked

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON The chasm between America’s haves and have-nots has reached Grand Canyonesque proportions.

By RYAN ALEXANDER ncle Sam has pushed more than $8 billion into the pot, gambling on big returns from the nuclear power industry. Sadly, we know where this ends.

Southern Company is salivating over an $8.33 billion conditional loan guarantee announced this week for the construction of two reactors in Waynesboro, Ga. The “lucky” backer of that long shot bet? The US taxpayer. If the current state and history of the nuclear industry tells us anything, signing off on this tentative agreement will deal us a losing hand.

This will be the first Treasury-backed loan guarantee for a new nuclear reactor under the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program. The program was created in 2005 to distribute loan guarantees to innovative energy technologies.

While the program covers a range of emerging technologies, other mature industries — like coal and nuclear — are also eligible. Currently, the program has an overall cap of $51 billion, with $18.5 billion in loan guarantee authority earmarked for nuclear reactors.

Adding to the program’s already significant federal financial risks, President Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposed taxpayers go all in on this nuclear gamble. To begin funding the industry’s so-called “nuclear renaissance,” the administration’s budget has proposed tripling the amount of loan guarantees for nuclear power to $54.5 billion.

But even before Obama had proposed this increase, nuclear power was belly up to the bar for federally backed loan guarantees. With extremely high capital costs, significant technology risks, and a track record of project defaults, the industry can’t get anyone on Wall Street to back them. Even when the market couldn’t get enough exotic, high-risk investments a few years ago, nuclear power was kryptonite to investors. To date, the nuclear industry has applied for $122 billion in loan guarantees — far surpassing any other loan guarantee applicant.

With numbers this high, these loan guarantees could cause a huge financial hangover. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office considers the risk of default on the part of the nuclear industry to be very high — above 50% — and payments for defaults would come directly from the Treasury. Additionally, Department of Energy loan guarantees carry an extremely high risk because they can cover the entire value of a loan, worth up to 80% of a project’s total cost — terms far better than any private lender would provide.

In the case of Southern Co., Obama is promising the full faith and credit of the US Treasury behind a $14 billion dollar project that already has serious design flaws, even though construction has yet to begin. The story is much the same for the other nuclear projects that are lining up for loan guarantees. In many cases cost estimates have doubled and there is turmoil between project owners. And many of the new US reactors rely on designs that are in financial shambles in other parts of the world to boot.

If the nuclear industry is a solid investment, then it should be able to receive the backing of Wall Street.

For over a half-century, taxpayers have propped up the nuclear industry with more than $100 billion in subsidies.

It’s time for the gravy train to stop. Facing massive budget deficits for as far as the eye can see, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to gamble billions of dollars backing loans for an industry plagued with financing, design, and construction delays and a track record of defaulting on loans.

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Is ‘Undercover Boss’ the Most Subversive Show on TV? s reality TV finally living up to its name? Most of what we are served up under that rubric is actually the furthest thing from reality. The exploits of Snooki, Jake the Bachelor and all those Real Housewives hardly reflect life as most of America knows it and lives it.

The real America is hurting — not jetting off to an exotic location for Fantasy Suite canoodling. But no matter how sobering the statistics we are getting on a regular basis (and I’ll offer up some bracing ones in a moment), the hardships and suffering tens of millions of Americans are experiencing are almost entirely absent from our popular culture.

Which is a shame, because drama and narrative have the ability to move people’s perceptions in a way that raw numbers never can.

Enter Undercover Boss, the new CBS reality show in which corporate CEOs don disguieses and spend a few days experiencing what it’s like to be a low-level worker at their companies.

Watching the show — including the episode in which the CEO of a waste management company vacuumed out port-apotties and learned that one of his employees, a woman who drives a garbage truck, has to urinate in a cup because her productivity requirements leave her no time for a bathroom break — I thought of Benjamin Disraeli.

Before becoming Prime Minister of England, Disraeli wanted to issue a wake up call about the horrible state of the British working class. So, in 1845, he wrote a novel, Sybil, which warned of the danger of England disintegrating into “two nations between whom there is no sympathy, as if they were inhabitants of different planets.” The book became a sensation,

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and the outrage it provoked propelled fundamental social reforms.

In the 19th century, one of the most effective ways to convey the quiet desperation of the working class to a wide audience was via a realistic novel. In 2010, it’s through reality TV. And Undercover Boss has clearly touched a nerve with viewers. Last week, only the Olympics and “American Idol” scored higher in the ratings.

It’s the kind of popular entertainment that can start out as one thing — a fun, high concept reality show — but morph into something that affects the zeitgeist by turning a spotlight on just how out of touch America’s corporate chiefs are. And their cluelessness is not just about the jobs their workers do — it’s about the lives their workers lead.

Ever since Roseanne went off the air, network TV has not been the most welcoming place when it comes to telling the stories of working class Americans. But now, week in and week out, millions can see what downsizing and Wall Street’s demands for ever-greater productivity and earning margins did to the lives of so many Americans, even before the economic crisis.

The chasm between America’s haves and have-nots has reached Grand Canyonesque proportions. Thirty years ago top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of 30 times what their workers did — now they make 300 times what their workers make.

That’s the kind of statistic a show like Undercover Boss can put flesh and blood on. Here are a few others: • Since 2000, 3.2 million more American households are trying to make do on under $25,000 a year.

• In 2005, households in the bottom 20% had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20% made $159,583 — a disparity of 1,500%, the highest gap ever recorded.

• In 2007, the top 10% pocketed almost half of all the money earned in America — the highest percentage recorded since 1917 (including, as Henry Blodget notes, 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the “roaring 1920s”).

Making matters even worse is the fact that while the classes are moving further apart — with the middle class in real danger of entirely disappearing — mobility across the classes has declined. The American Dream is defined by the promise of economic and social mobility, but the American Reality proves just how elusive that dream has become. Indeed, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and even the often-reviled France have greater upward mobility than we do.

Here are the numbers: • Almost 100 million Americans are

in families that make less in real income than their parents did at their same age.

• The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only 7%.

If you were born to wealthy parents but didn’t go to college, you’re more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.

In other words, as the middle class is squeezed and more and more people are being pushed down, it’s becoming harder than ever to move up.

Those are ugly trends, but Americans still want to believe otherwise. Over 60% of parents think that their children will have a higher standard of living than they have. And over 70% believe that drive and hard work play a bigger role in economic mobility than external factors, such as the income of parents.

As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution and John E. Morton of the Pew Charitable Trusts wrote in a study of economic mobility: “The inherent promise of America is undermined if economic status is — or is seen as — merely a game of chance, with some having the good fortune to live in the best of times and some the bad luck to live in the worst of times. That is not the America heralded in lore and experienced in reality by millions of our predecessors.”

And yet it’s certainly the reality being experienced now, and, at least in part, the reality being shown on Undercover Boss.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the show is going to foment a working class rebellion or directly lead to a raft of social reforms.

But it might lead to a conversation we, as a nation, desperately need to have — especially in Washington.

Instead, we have two parties that often seem as clueless as the undercover bosses.

On one side of the aisle we have the likes of Jim Bunning, willing to hold up unemployment benefits for millions to pull a meaningless budget stunt, and the likes of Jon Kyl, the GOP’s No. 2 man in the Senate, who believes that “continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

And on the other side of the aisle we have a president who believes to his core that the party of Bunning and Kyl must be won over before we can proceed with real reforms.

Maybe if our elected representatives went undercover for a little while and experienced the reality of the millions of American families that are measurably worse off because of Washington’s actions and inactions, we might get some real change.

Arianna Huffington is founder of HuffingtonPost.com. Write her c/o 1158 26th St. PMB 426, Santa Monica, CA 90403, email: arianna@huffingtonpost.com.

Ryan Alexander is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense (taxpayer.net), a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog. Distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.

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How Healthcare Reform Makes History This isn’t a return to the New Deal or the Great Society. It’s an incremental step forward, with big implications.

By ROBERT REICH t’s not nearly as momentous as the passage of Medicare in 1965 and won’t fundamentally alter how Americans think about social safety nets. But the passage of Obama’s healthcare reform bill is the biggest thing Congress has done in decades, and has enormous political significance for the future.

Medicare directly changed the life of every senior in America, giving them health security and dramatically reducing their rates of poverty. By contrast, most Americans won’t be affected by Obama’s healthcare legislation. Most of us will continue to receive health insurance through our employers. (Only a comparatively small minority will be required to buy insurance who don’t want it, or be subsidized in order to afford it. Only a relatively few companies will be required to provide it who don’t now.)

Medicare built on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal notion of government as insurer, with citizens making payments to government, and government paying out benefits. That was the central idea of Social Security, and Medicare piggybacked on Social Security.

Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for healthcare based on private insurers and employers. Eisenhower locked in the tax break for employee health benefits; Nixon pushed prepaid, competing health plans, and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees.

Obama applies Nixon’s idea and takes it a step further by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, and giving subsidies to those who need it.

So don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s healthcare legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back to-

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JOE CONASON Boehner is angry — and GOP should worry hat is the reward for acting with courage and principle, confronting the worst slurs, threats of violence, waves of falsehood, major monied interests, and widespread predictions of electoral defeat? As President Obama said in his remarks to the House Democrats on the eve of their vote for healthcare reform, the only certain compensation for doing what is right will be history’s judgment. Yet perhaps all the forecasts of doom will prove wrong — as they so often do in Washington — and voters will honor lawmakers who finally stood up for the core values of their party.

A few days before the Sunday night vote, Dan Balz noted in the Washington Post that the electorate sounds even angrier at Congress than usual — a threatening portent for incumbents in November. Even in that poll, however, the lowest status was reserved not for the Democratic congressional leadership, whose numbers have indeed dropped, but for the Republican leaders.

No doubt John Boehner is well aware of that public contempt. Watching the minority leader speak on the House floor, pretending to be a populist demagogue rather than a corporate stooge, his anger seemed less provoked by the specifics of the healthcare legislation than with its likely political impact. If he feels so confident that the people will massively repudiate this bill in the midterm election — and thus make him speaker — why was he so furious? Why did the bill’s imminent passage turn his usual orangey-tan complexion almost incandescent red with rage?

The answer could be found in the subtext of Boehner’s speech, which did not dwell on the bill’s specific provisions, beyond its alleged expense. He knows that arguing the bill’s specific provisions is very dangerous to his party, because so many of them are quite popular and the public will hold Republicans in disrepute for opposing them.

An informed public was always the ultimate peril for the Republicans in this process, so distorted during the past year by wild propaganda about death panels, government takeovers, and the entire mythology of the Obama admin-

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ward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.

The significance of Obama’s health legislation is more political than substantive. For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama’s health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution. In political terms, that’s a very big deal.

Most Americans continue to be suspicious of government. That distrust is deeply etched in our culture and traditions. Our system of government was devised by people who distrusted government and intentionally created checks and balances, three separate branches, and almost insuperable odds against getting big things done. The period extending from 1933 to 1965 — the New Deal and the Great Society — was an historical aberration from that long tradition, animated by the unique crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and the social cohesion that flowed from them for another generation. Ronald Reagan merely picked up where Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover left off.

But Reagan’s view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of healthcare relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests.

We will not return to the New Deal or the Great Society, but nor will we continue to wallow in the increasingly obsolete Reagan view that we don’t need a strong and competent government.

Yesterday’s vote confirms our hope that we can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious hope, but we have no choice.

Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. He blogs at robertreich.org. This appeared at Salon.com.

istration’s socialist-communist-Nazi-totalitarianism.

Creating those crazy expectations was a strategy that depended on the bill never passing. If and when people learn what is actually in the legislation, many of them will realize that they were misled, and will end up appreciating most of what the Democrats have passed, after all.

Certainly that possibility is what troubles David Frum, who expressed his fears March 21 in a post titled “Waterloo” (after the triumphal predictions of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., of the consequences for Obama if healthcare reform were to be defeated). Before he became notorious for writing war-mongering speeches for President Bush, Frum was admired among conservatives for uttering unvarnished criticisms of his own movement, notably in a 1995 book titled Dead Right (a passionate screed that urged the party toward deeper ideological consistency — much the opposite of his current complaint).

The Republicans bet on killing healthcare reform and lost, says Frum — and by November, voters will come to understand the appealing aspects of the legislation, even as the broader economic and political environment improves for Democrats. Now he warns, “It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.”

Frum is harshly realistic about the chances to reverse this historic step forward: “No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the ‘doughnut hole’ and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year-olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there — would President Obama sign such a repeal?”

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira found hard evidence that underscores Frum’s fears in a public opinion experiment undertaken by Newsweek last month. The magazine’s pollsters first asked respondents whether they support or oppose the president’s healthcare reform plan, with predictable results: 40% in favor, 49% opposed, 11% undecided.

Then the pollsters described major aspects of the bill — the insurance exchanges, the strict regulation of insurance company policies, the requirement for insurance with government assistance to those who need help, the tax on expensive plans, the fines on those who don’t get insurance, and the public option. Not only did most of those aspects of the bill poll favorably, but the overall legislation

12 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

ticked up by 8 points when the pollsters asked the same people again whether they support or oppose it. The second time reversed the initial results: 48% in favor, 43% opposed, 9% unsure.

That sharp turnaround in opinion occurred in a matter of minutes during a telephone call with a stranger. Now the president and the congressional Democrats have seven months to make the same argument, and smart Republicans are properly terrified that they will.

Joe Conason is a columnist for Salon.com, where this originally appeared.

They Say They Want a Revolution

By MARK POTOK gged on by cheers and interrupted by standing ovations, one-time GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin told the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville that President Obama’s spending was “immoral” and amounted to “theft.” She said America needed politicians “to proclaim their alliance to our Creator.” She opined that the Democrats were “running out of time.”

And then she got to the punch-line: “America is ready for another revolution.”

Presumably, Palin was speaking in metaphors, as she apparently did when she accused the president of trying to set up “death panels” to decide which Americans will live and which will die. But it’s hard to say. More than a few tea partiers and attendees of town halls on health care have paraphrased Thomas Jefferson, saying the “tree of liberty” again needs “watering” with “the blood of tyrants.”

Palin’s provocative comments came as a new Rasmussen Reports poll showed that 75% of likely American voters were “angry” or “very angry” at the policies of the federal government, up from 66% in September. The poll also found that 88% of “mainContinued on next page

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Zero Public Option + One Mandate = Disaster

By NORMAN SOLOMON ot long ago, the most prominent supporters of the public option were touting it as essential for healthcare reform. Now, suddenly, it’s incidental.

In fact, many who were lauding a public option as the key to a better healthcare future are now condemning just about anyone who insists that the absence of a public option makes the current bill unworthy of support.

Consider this statement: “If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current healthcare bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over healthcare and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real healthcare reform.”

That statement is as true today as it was when Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made it three months ago in a Washington Post op-ed. But now, a concerted political blitz is depicting anyone who takes such a position as a menace to “real healthcare reform.”

After devoting vast amounts of time, money, energy and political capital to banging the drum for the public option as absolutely vital during 2009 and through this winter, countless liberal organizations and prominent Democrats in Congress have made a short-order shift.

You are now to understand that the public option isn’t essential — it’s expendable. And all of the sudden, people who assert that a public option is a minimal requirement for meaningful healthcare reform are no longer principled — they’re pernicious.

This dynamic goes way beyond the routine malleability of political positions. While the whips crack on Capitol Hill, what we’re seeing is a stampede of herd doublethink.

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I CONTINUE TO BELIEVE THAT guaranteed healthcare — a.k.a. single-payer or enhanced Medicare for all — is the only way to solve this country’s enormous healthcare crisis. But early last year, before the public option shrank and shrank some more and then disappeared under the bus of the Obama administration, it appeared to possibly be a significant step forward.

But the White House, even while claiming to want a public option, was cutting deals with the pharmaceutical and hospital industries while ditching the public option.

For those who doubt that the administration engaged in double-dealing to such an extent, I recommend the March

Revolution ...

Continued from preceding page stream voters” were angry, but 84% of the “political class” was not — another indication at how leaders are widely seen as completely out of touch. Joe Stack’s deadly airborne attack on an IRS building in Austin serves as a clear example of how deadly that fury can be.

The numbers are harrowing, and hearken back to the period around the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, when the antigovernment “Patriot” movement was at its hottest. A few days after that attack left 168 men, women, and children dead, a USA Today poll found that fully 39% of Americans agreed with the proposition that the federal government was “so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll asked precisely the same question and found that 56% of Americans now agree with that statement—a simply astonishing measure of how angry and suspicious we have become.

The Oklahoma City attack was the culmination of political anger against the government that had been building for years over issues such as gun control, environmental regulation, the outsourcing of

16 article by Huffington Post writer Miles Mogulescu, “NY Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill Public Option” (www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/nytimes-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html).

A postscript from Mogulescu voices a broader outlook. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs here: “Whenever I write blogs which are critical of Obama and Congressional Democrats for making corporatist deals, I get numerous comments from people who believe they are progressive but say they will never vote for Obama or Democrats again, that they will stay home at the next election, or that they will vote for small third parties who have no chance of winning. It’s not my intent to encourage those views. Do people making these comments really think bringing Republicans back to power would make things better? ...

“Progressives need to have a sophisticated and nuanced relationship with elected Democrats. After the 2008 elections, too many progressive organizations demobilized believing their job was simply to take orders from the White House to support Obama’s agenda, whatever it was. That was a mistake. It’s equally a mistake for progressives to overreact in the opposite direction and think they can abandon electoral politics and do nothing to prevent the Republicans from regaining power. What’s needed is a powerful grassroots progressive movement to force elected officials to do the right thing more often and to counter-balance the power of big money in politics. The periods of progressive change in American politics, like the Progressive Era, The New Deal, and the Great Society, have come when strong progressive movements have forced elites and elected officials to enact somewhat progressive legislation.”

The dynamic now in full force on Capitol Hill was aptly described by Dean in his Post op-ed midway through December: “In Washington, when major bills near final passage, an inside-the-Beltway mentality takes hold. Any bill becomes a victory. Clear thinking is thrown out the window for political calculus. In the heat of battle, decisions are being made that set an irreversible course for how future health reform is done. The result is legislation that has been crafted to get votes, not to reform healthcare.”

A week after Dean’s article, the Senate approved the healthcare bill that is now on track to be “deemed” by the House — with the avid support of Dean and numerous other public-option enthusiasts, and also for that matter with the support of Rep. John Conyers and many other single-payer enthusiasts (including, as of March 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich).

The quality of the Senate healthcare legislation hasn’t improved in the three months since Dean condemned it. What has gone over the top is the cacophony of voices and pressures to tout doublethink as virtuous pragmatism.

BUT THERE ARE BIG PROBLEMS WITH skipping lightly past the absence of a public option in the current bill. And none is bigger than the reality of the individual mandate in the legislation.

It’s remarkable and sadly revealing that boosters of the bill have scarcely mentioned — much less publicly come to terms with — the dire implications of a nearly enacted law that requires people to have health insurance and offers no option other than further enriching the private insurance industry.

jobs, and the purported crushing of dissent.

Today, the fury is building again, this time over bailouts of banks and the auto industry, health insurance, the economy, government spending, and the country’s changing demographics.

And that anger has fueled a pervasive rage on the right—a rage reflected, as the Southern Poverty Law Center just reported, in the dramatic growth of radical groups. Hate groups last year remained at record levels, despite the collapse of a major neo-Nazi group. Anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%. And, most dramatically, militias and the larger “Patriot” movement came roaring back, with 363 new militias and related groups appearing in 2009 for a dizzying 244% increase.

These three strands of the radical right—hatemongers, nativist extremist groups, and so-called “Patriot” organizations—are the most volatile elements on the American political landscape. Taken together, their numbers increased by more than 40%, rising from 1,248 groups in 2008 to 1,753 last year.

It’s perfectly obvious that many Americans are unhappy with the way the government is operating these days. And it’s equally obvious that our country faces a daunting array of serious problems and challenges. But the way forward isn’t to deal with the kinds of vicious attacks, conspiracy theorizing and downright racism—

Last year, when the subject came up, progressive supporters of the White House’s general approach were quick to offer assurances that a public option would mitigate the unpleasant aspects of mandated coverage. After all, the story went, people could select a nonprofit governmentrun entity for insurance coverage rather than being forced to choose between corporate insurance policies.

But now, if the pending bill becomes law, people will be forced to choose between corporate insurance policies.

Meanwhile, all the hype about how 30 million more Americans “will be covered” fails to deal with the quality and cost of their purported coverage, much less how much real access to healthcare will actually result.

For many, the available coverage would be bottomof-the-barrel quality — and even then, given thin personal finances, would cause added strains to pay for premiums.

In the absence of public-option health insurance run for purposes other than maximizing profits, the built-in unfairness of an individual mandate becomes magnified.

What’s more, the very concept of healthcare as a human right will be fundamentally undermined by placing the health-insurance burden on individuals. Many who receive government subsidies will routinely struggle to make ends meet, while making do with shoddy health plans as part of a new configuration of healthcare apartheid. And, inevitably, the extent of government subsidies will be vulnerable to attacks from politicians eager to cut “entitlements.”

On a political level, the mandate provision is a massive gift to the Republican Party, all set to keep on giving to the right wing for many years. With a highly intrusive requirement that personal funds and government subsidies be paid to private corporations, the law would further empower right-wing populists who want to pose as foes of government “elites” bent on enriching Wall Street.

With this turn of the “healthcare reform” screw, the Democratic Party will be cast — with strong evidence — as a powerful tool of corporate America. But the Democrats on Capitol Hill and the organizations eagerly whipping for passage are determined to celebrate the enactment of something called “healthcare reform.”

“WHEN I USE A WORD,” Humpty Dumpty said, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” Alice replied, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” Humpty Dumpty responded, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Many well-informed and insightful people are now hoping that the current healthcare bill will become law and then lead to something better. But few backers want to dwell on its requirement that everyone get health coverage from the private insurance industry — a stunning, deeply structural transfer of humongous power and wealth that would greatly boost the leverage of an already autocratic corporate state.

Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. See www.normansolomon.com

not to mention talk of “revolution”—that we see coming from the radical right. That kind of talk merely ensures that none of these problems will be seriously addressed.

Mark Potok is director of the Southern

Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors extremist activity across the United States. Rage on the Right, the organization’s new report on the growth of extremist groups can be read at www.splcenter.org.

Distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.

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FROMA HARROP Maine’s small Republican base need not fret. Snowe is no compromiser when it counts for them.

Will Snowe Fall in Maine? o visit potato country at the tippytop of Maine. There, struggling farmers can look across the St. John River at equally hard-pressed potato growers in New Brunswick, Canada. The big difference between them is that if one of the Mainers falls grievously ill, the family may have to sell the farm to pay medical bills. The Canadian family doesn’t.

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JESSE JACKSON This deficit isn’t because America is poor ... It comes from perverted priorities.

This in-your-face gap in health care security is most keenly felt along the border with Canada. That makes the determination

by Maine’s two “moderate” Republican senators to oppose health care reform all the more extraordinary. Are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins reading the papers back home?

Polls show Mainers strongly in favor of serious reform, including the public option.

That support can only have hardened this month, when Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced plans to raise health-insurance premiums in Maine by up to 23%.

(Anthem holds 80% of the market.)

But none of this has emboldened either Snowe or Collins to buck orders coming down from Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He explains why no Republican may vote for the health care bill as follows: “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this was OK, they must have figured it out.”

Come November 2012, Snowe won’t face the senator from Kentucky. She’ll face the people of Maine. Democrats would do well to find a challenger more formidable

than the organic farmer they ran last time.

For over 150 years, New England Republicans could be relied on to back progressive legislation, as long as it was paid for. That political culture almost vanished with the departures of Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords and Connecticut Rep. Chris Shays. These truly independent Republicans took enormous abuse from party enforcers and thus ran a kind of interference for the likes of Snowe and Collins.

Now hardly a day goes by in which Snowe doesn’t issue a press release touting how hard she’s working with Democrats on some minor matter. But health care is the big one. It is the issue of a generation.

Snowe inflicted her worst damage on this reform by holding it up. As a member of the Senate Finance Committee, she wasted week after week supposedly negotiating with Democrats. The delay left the proposals sitting for months like roadkill to be picked apart by vultures. Her top demand, removal of the public option, was met, and she voted against the full Senate bill anyway.

The politics of being Olympia Snowe are very interesting. Maine’s registered voters are 33% Democratic, 27% Republican

and almost 40% “other.” In November, Snowe’s approval ratings among constituents were already slipping from their formerly sky-high levels, according to a Public Policy Polling survey.

Remarkably, her poorest showing, 40 percent, was among Republicans, whose base reviles her as a compromiser. Snowe drew her biggest approval rating, 60%, from Democrats, followed by independents at 51%. But that was back when she was still playing the brave moderate trying to work a bipartisan deal on health care.

Maine’s small Republican base need not fret. Snowe is no compromiser when it counts for them. Barring a surprise turnaround, she’s sticking with “the strategy” most memorably articulated by South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

I wonder how most Maine voters, who still voice strong backing for the president, feel about Snowe now. One thing is clear: Olympia Snowe is not going to waltz into re-election.

Dangerous water is only one part of our crushing and costly public investment deficit. A bridge falls in America every other day. Our trains now ship goods more slowly than they did decades ago. Many of our schools are in such disrepair that they are dangerous to the health of their students.

This is the result of a continued assault on the public sphere. Public schools, public health care, public parks and roads, the post office — all are denigrated. The wealthy buy their way out with gated communities, private mail delivery, private resorts and private schools. Working and poor people have no way out.

This deficit isn’t because America is

poor, although poverty is increasing. It comes from perverted priorities. The Iraq War, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz tells us, will end up costing about $3 trillion.

We spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined on our military every year.

We spend more to defend South Korea than the South Koreans do. As Warren Buffett reports, the wealthiest Americans pay a lower tax rate than their chauffeurs. Over the past decades, taxes have been cut on private speculation, much of which ships jobs and money abroad, rather than devoted to public investment that would create jobs and 21st century infrastructure here.

One thing is clear: If we want to build

a new economy that can sustain a broad middle class and provide Americans who work hard with the opportunity to reach the American dream, then we have to invest in our future. If not, the US will continue the path it has been on, becoming a nation of greater inequality, greater poverty, with declining wages. It’s a big and beautiful country. We’ll still be a good cheap place to visit, only the streets will grow more dangerous and you wouldn’t want to drink the water.

Infrastructure Deficit Catches Healthcare Reform Triumph a Up with US s the United States becoming a place Credit to Nancy Pelosi’s Savvy

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where you don’t dare to drink the water? Consider the following: According to the New York Times, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country. In the nation’s capital, there is a pipe break every day on average. And this weekend, severe rains flooded the system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

Since 2004, the Times reports, more than 49 million Americans have been exposed to water with “illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.”

Some 19 million Americans become ill each year due to parasites, viruses and bacteria in drinking water, according to the Times article.

Since 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 3 million Americans have been exposed to illegal concentrations of arsenic and radioactive elements linked to cancer. More than a quarter of those systems violating arsenic or radioactivity standards have never been contacted by a regulator.

This is a right-now, real-life health care crisis. Many of our sewers were built around the time of the Civil War. They have been starved for funds for years, as political leaders choose to live with breakdowns, patches and repairs to avoid the big-time costs of replacement. In the three decades of conservative domination of our national politics, federal funding wasn’t adequate. Worse, federal enforcement of the Clean Water Act declined with the general assault on regulation. New EPA head Lisa P. Jackson announced an overhaul of enforcement, but this comes after years of neglect.

“There is significant reluctance within the EPA and Justice Department to bring actions against municipalities,” the Times quotes David Uhlmann, who served as head of the Justice Department’s environmental crimes division in the last administration, “because there’s a view that they are often cash-strapped.”

And that was before the Great Recession.

By STEVE KORNACKI he seeds of the historic House vote Sunday night, March 21, were planted not by Barack Obama’s election in 2008, but by a little-noticed internal House leadership contest nearly a decade ago.

Back in the fall of 2001, two Democrats were vying for the vacant position of House minority whip. But the election wasn’t really for the caucus’ No. 2 leadership spot. It was for the top job.

Richard Gephardt, then the Democrats’ House leader, would be stepping down after the next election, so the winner of the whip’s race would be in-line to replace him — and to become the House Democrats’ public face for the next decade, at least. Which is why there was trepidation — to put it mildly — among more than a few Democratic members about the race’s front-runner: Nancy Pelosi.

The knock on Pelosi was simple: To anoint a “San Francisco liberal” as a party icon would simply affirm the caricature of Democratic leaders that Republicans had been peddling for years — to devastating effect. Better to pick her less strident, more pragmatic rival, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, their thinking went. But Pelosi had the votes and won what remains the longest leadership campaign in House history (more than three years of starts and stops) by a 118-95 count.

That verdict led directly to March 21. Because the ideological ambition that separated Pelosi from Hoyer is probably what saved the concept of wholesale healthcare reform when it seemed destined for the trash heap just two months ago.

Pelosi, we have learned in recent days, was instrumental in prodding the White House to press ahead with its push for large-scale reform after January’s special Senate election in Massachusetts — even as Rahm Emanuel, once a House man himself, urged the president to radically pare back his vision. And it was Pelosi who then somehow struck a deal with the Senate and found a way to convince 219 of her fellow Democrats to vote “yes” on a bill they hated.

It’s impossible to know for sure how Hoyer, had he been the Speaker, would have responded to Scott Brown’s Massachusetts triumph. But his political history shows him to be much more of an incrementalist then Pelosi. It’s hard to imagine his instincts would have been any different from Emanuel’s — and that Democrats, under a Speaker Hoyer, would on Sunday night have been able to boast of expanding coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans.

Fittingly, just minutes after the final vote, Hoyer himself hailed Pelosi as “the single most responsible person for this night’s success.”

The passage of healthcare reform is not just a triumph of Pelosi’s liberal idealism, though it is partly that. It’s just as much a triumph of her underappreciated legislative savvy — mastery, really. In the ’01 leadership race, Hoyer was supposed to be the skilled tactician. Pelosi was supposed to be the clueless ideologue.

But as speaker, she’s adeptly she’s mixed her idealism with the

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14 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

Froma Harrop is a writer with the Providence (R.I.) Journal.

Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. can be reached c/o the Rainbow Coalition, 930 E 50th St., Chicago, IL 60615. Email jjackson@rainbowpush.org.

deft touch of a seasoned congressional insider.

You need look no further than the healthcare saga for confirmation of this. Who else could have pulled off what Pelosi just did? For more than a year, she carefully balanced the wildly disparate interests of her caucus’ various coalitions — the progressives who demanded a “robust” public option, the Blue Dogs who cared mainly about deficits, the pro-lifers who made abortion their make-or-break issue, and on and on. She gave away just enough to each group to keep reform alive — without sacrificing her own bottom-line of near-universal coverage.

She also went to war with the Senate after the Massachusetts special election — and won, forcing that chamber’s leaders to embrace the reconciliation process they’d been shunning.

Since Obama’s inauguration, Pelosi has racked up an impressive list of achievements. She pushed the stimulus bill through, then cap-and-trade, and now healthcare. And those are just the headline items. For a woman who supposedly hails from her party’s left-wing fringe, she sure has a knack for winning over moderates when it matters.

Her tenure, of course, is not without its flaws. She badly miscalculated, for instance, when just days after the Democrats won their majority in 2006 she began pushing for John Murtha to supplant Hoyer as the party’s No. 2 leader. Hoyer, humbled by his ’01 defeat (and Pelosi’s success in freezing out his allies from most other prominent caucus slots), had long since given up on the idea of challenging her again. But her paranoid side got the best of her, and she sought to marginalize him once and for all. She failed and was herself humbled.

Politicians like to tell voters that they believe in always doing the right thing — no matter how unpopular it is. But they rarely mean it. As speaker, though, Pelosi has lived it.

For the last three years, Republicans have done exactly what all of those centrist House Democrats worried about in 2001, wasting no opportunity to portray Pelosi as Jane Fonda with a gavel. They’ve certainly had some success. Pelosi’s approval rating is low, especially among independents. (Of course, any other Democratic speaker would probably be in about the same position; that’s the price of being the most visible figure in a body that everyone loves to hate.)

And mostly, Pelosi has shrugged it off. A different speaker looking at the same poll numbers might have been tempted to go along with Emanuel’s scaled-back healthcare vision in January.

But Pelosi ridiculed it as “kiddie care.” She knew what was right (at least in her mind), she knew how to make it a reality, and on Sunday night she did just that.

Public opinion is a funny thing. By any standard, Pelosi’s healthcare achievement is significant. But it might not alter her poll numbers at all. She’ll probably still be a Republican punching-bag this fall. Republicans, for instance, will probably torment the embattled Harry Reid over the praise he heaped on Pelosi this weekend – when he called her “the greatest speaker the House has ever had.”

Those words just might do Reid in with Nevada’s electorate in 2010. But history just might smile on them.

Steve Kornacki is news editor for Salon.com, where this appeared.

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HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas them (OK, it can’t cure paraplegia — that’s Health Policy only in the movies), but they can’t pay for Either they have no insurance, or their at the Movies it.insurance falls short. Unlike Jake, they don’t have the option of morphing into lthough Oscar mania has passed, Americans’ enthusiasm for movies remains high. No wonder: the cinematic world is a glorified respite from reallife America.

Indeed, the hits cast a grim light on Health Care USA — an almost subliminal light, but discernible to a discerning eye.

Avatar and the Underinsured Everybody older than age 6 has thrilled to the tale of Jake Scully, a wounded marine who goes undercover to infiltrate the Na’vi on Pandora, a planet rich in Unobtainium, which earthlings on our dying planet need. For Jake, the end is predictable: he becomes one of the “them.”

We’ve seen that ending before. But the question to ponder: Why does Jake go undercover? Adventure? Patriotism? Greed?

No. The reason is medical. Jake is a paraplegic, and his insurance won’t pay for new legs. To get those legs, he turns into a green-tailed creature.

Many Americans face the same dilemma as Jake. Medical science can help

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avatars.

Crazy Heart and Substance Abuse Country music-lovers warmed to Bad Blake, a down-at-the-heels singer reduced to bartering songs for drinks in a bowling alley. The plot tracked his alcohol-fueled descent to the bottom. An axiom is that an addict must reach “bottom,” before embracing help. In the movie, once Bad asked for help, he got it. The ending is happy: Bad is sober, back on stage — a real one, not a bowling alley.

Outside the silver screen, substance abuse treatment is available — provided the addict, or an insurer, can pay. Publicly funded programs (they are not the plush residential facilities in Crazy Heart) have waiting lists. The movie doesn’t explain how Bad paid for treatment. Did his longtime friend put him on a group policy? Did his agent? At the start of the film Bad was broke — a true-to-life portrait of a man nearing bottom. The flesh-and-blood Bads don’t have as easy a time as the cinematic one climbing up from their bottoms.

It’s Complicatedand Elective Procedures The robustly healthy characters in It’s Complicated want medicine to give them more of the good life. Jake (Alec Baldwin) is a corporate attorney married to a trophy wife who wants a sibling for her 5-year old son. Long ago, in marriage #1 to Jane (Meryl Streep), he sired three children, so once upon a younger time he produced enough sperm. But now he wants — and can pay for — physicians to make him fertile once again. So, in one scene, he waits with other aging couples in a fertility clinic.

Meryl Streep, on the other hand, looks beautiful to her millions of fans. She wants to erase wrinkles. A dermatologist, who sees a patient-load of similar women, advises Meryl of the months of uncomfortable recuperation. Meryl demurs, not at the price tag, but at the recuperation. In the rarefied world of the cinematic Santa Barbara, people can pay for their heart’s desires, whether it is an addition to an already glorious house, sperm-enhancement, or wrinkle-reduction.

Even in real-life Santa Barbara, though, many people cannot have their medical hearts’ desires. Maids, waiters, construction workers are struggling to get the care that they desperately need. (In fact, the Wall Street Journal recently reported a drop in demand for cosmetic procedures: the recession has hit even the real-life Janes and Jakes.)

Never Asked, Didn’t Care

By BILL JOHNSTON on’t Ask — Don’t Tell! I recently pulled out my Air Force enlistment record and discovered — I was never asked!

Thinking back to 1966 and my four years in the US Air Force the question occurred to me — “When did the military and congressional homophobes start obsessing over gays in the military?

At discharge every veteran receives a large white envelope with a large Department of Defense seal on it.

I pulled mine out of my filing cabinet in the basement the other day and took a look. Inside were transfer orders, training records, my military drivers license, my DD Form 214 (needed for any veterans benefits) and I found a copy of my original enlistment form. Other than the fact I was an awful speller I discovered something else.

Apparently in 1966 the US Military didn’t care if anyone was gay. I searched for the question. Looked for any group listed that might “tip” someone off to a hidden proclivity — nothing — not a thing — zero!

No one it seems gave a hoot in 1966! What changed by 1992 when this incredibly idiotic policy kicked in? An idiotic policy addressing a “problem” that

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SAM URETSKY Safer Drugs Another Victim of Lobbyists ealth care costs are rising — for lots of reasons. The American population is getting older, so that more people need more care. New drugs and diagnostic methods increase costs. Lack of proper diet and sufficient exercise leads to more people with chronic conditions.

There’s fraud and waste and defensive medicine that leads to unneeded tests and referrals to specialists. There are efforts to control costs, such as prior approval systems, which call for more paperwork and reviews so that it can be difficult to tell whether it would have been less expensive in the long run to just let the prescriber do whatever she wanted to do.

Aside from that, sometimes everybody is just wrong.

It happens. Back in 1921, James Walsh wrote “All down the course of medical history we find in each generation as a rule at least one, but often a whole series of remedies or modes of treatment which were vaunted as cures for disease and sometimes recognized as such even by authorities in medicine, though afterwards on further investigation they proved to have no curative effect at all and indeed were determined by scientists to be rather harmful than beneficial to mankind.” This observation is still

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didn’t exist. Did it come about due to a combination of homophobic army officers, theocratic right wing politicians? One can only speculate — was it a draft dodging president, ill at ease around uniforms and harboring an embarrassment for running out as others in his generation served in a wartime military? Add to the mix Clinton’s total lack of understanding of military law and you begin to understand how we got a really dumb policy on gays in the military.

How do I know there was no problem? Well, my job in the Air Force was as a legal specialist. I worked in the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate or more commonly known as “The Legal Office.” Any violation of the law or policy came through us — we knew about it!

Every morning we read the police blotters for the military and civilian police. In 1967 I was in charge of reviewing over 1000 Article 15s (the military equivalent of misdemeanors) for three major Air Force bases. I saw everything from attempted murder, rape, assault, incest, bad checks, adultery (punishable in the military) and gold smuggling — but never did I see any incident or policy violation involving homosexual conduct. Conduct that would have fallen under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — widely referred to as “conduct

true, and isn’t limited to fringe medicine. We still have a good number of complimentary and alternative theories that have their adherents, but beyond that, we have treatments that seemed like good ideas at the time, and turn out to be duds, and we’re resisting any effort to get rid of the duds that, at best are wasting money, and in some cases making us sicker.

Right now, one of the most significant problems in public health in the United States is the increase in incidence of Type 2 Diabetes. This is the form of diabetes once called Maturity Onset, and is marked by resistance to insulin (Type 1, once called Juvenile Diabetes, is caused by failure to produce enough insulin.) Type 2 diabetes leads to a collection of serious health problems, which can involve vision loss, circulatory problems, kidney and heart disease. The one well-established treatment is “lifestyle changes” — lose weight, exercise more, stop smoking. The trouble is, some people can’t, and others won’t. Some people seem to have a gene that promotes fat deposition. Others just don’t have the time, or the resources to follow these guidelines. People with osteoarthritis, another challenge that comes with age, may no longer be capable of vigorous exercise.

So, physicians turned to drugs — and typically, the more the better. Unfortunately, a series of studies seem to show that aggressive treatment of some cardiac risk factors in diabetic patients has no benefit in reducing heart disease, and may cause drug related adverse effects, as well as increasing costs. The Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes (ACCORD) Study Group tried bringing systolic blood pressure (the high number) down to 120 as compared with other patients who were held to

Julie and Julia and Obesity It is Meryl Streep again, this time as Julia Child, paired with an adoring acolyte who blogged a year-long trek. Julie made all those succulently rich recipes that Julia introduced to American kitchens. In this movie everybody is eating, cooking, or talking about food. And nobody is obese.

Obesity in real-life America, however, is epidemic. We eat lots, a lot of the time; but unlike the movies’ protagonists, we are eating lots of non-nutritious fare, while staring at television. Julia Child shopped, chopped, and stirred. She savored meals, often as a prelude to some romantic time with her husband. As for Julie, she lived in a third-floor walk-up, and between working, cooking, and blogging, she filled her days (alas, she enjoyed far less romantic time with her mate). The duo ate fresh produce, seafood, meat, dairy (lots of butter).

They didn’t gobble deep-fried snacks or processed food-stuff. Eating was the occasion for sharing not just food, but friendship and love.

In the movies we glimpse a world with no health care constraints, no pre-existing condition exclusions, no caps, no “no’s,” indeed, a world where nobody is obese.

How wonderful if real-life rated five stars.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

unbecoming.”

During my enlistment I was assigned to Judge Advocate Offices at Air Force Bases with thousands of airmen. I lived in the barracks on three occasions (I took lots of showers with lots of guys) and within this “band of brothers” no doubt were gay airmen but we all did our duty, served our country, respected one another and found a common pride in the uniform of the United States Air Force.

The current policy of “Don’t Ask — Don’t Tell” was established to “fix” something not broken. It is a policy based on ignorance denying patriotic Americans the right to serve their country. President Obama should show the same political courage and moral sense Harry Truman did when he desegregated the US Military by Executive Order.

The President needs to issue an Executive Order abolishing “Don’t Ask — Don’t Tell” policy now!

Surprisingly, maybe more to the point is a quote from the father of modern American Conservatism and US Air Force General, Sen, Barry Goldwater: He said: “If I’m in a foxhole I don’t care if the guy next to me is straight or not -– I just want him to be able to shoot straight!”

Bill Johnston is a retired staff organizer for United Food and Commercial Workers Union and hosts a labor show on KSER 90.7 FM in Everett, Wash. He is chair of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981).

140. The results showed no reduction in heart attacks and strokes, in fact the rate of cardiovascular deaths was slightly higher, and there were serious drug related problems as well. Another study from the same group indicated that there’s no benefit to using two cholesterol-lowering drugs as compared with just one.

Keep in mind that it’s routine to rely on the most recently published study, and studies, and their interpretations often disagree, but opposing results do show that there are no clear answers, even with modern methods, and more drugs and newer drugs aren’t always better treatment. The drugs just cost more, and had new, and often unpredicted adverse effects.

Recent studies show that a widely used drug for diabetes, rosiglitazone, might cause heart damage, and that other drugs might be equally effective and safer. But rosiglitazone became widely used when it turned out that an earlier drug, troglitazone, caused severe liver damage, so that rosiglitazone seemed to be better and safer.

The answer is simply well-conducted research, but when a center for this research was proposed as part of the health-care reform proposal, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhARMA) made quashing the proposal one of the targets of their lobbying effort. The trade association spent $6.3 million lobbying Congress in the last three months of 2009. It’s as if they’re afraid that knowing which treatment is safest and most effective might, just might, cut into their profits.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living on Long Island, N.Y.

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WAYNE O’LEARY Jobs, Jobs, Jobs obs, the conventional wisdom has it, will be key to the success of the Obama presidency and the survival of the Democratic Congress. In this case, the conventional wisdom is probably correct. An Economist poll taken in late January indicated that unemployment ranked first among concerns of the American public — well ahead of deficit reduction, terrorism, the Iraq war, or health-care reform — and that a 60% majority felt the president had done far too little to address the issue.

A few political kidney punches from the voters of Massachusetts have painfully raised the administration’s awareness and that of its congressional allies. The jobs shortage, which Democrats thought they had dealt with when they passed last year’s stimulus package, has shown itself to be the problem that won’t go away. Private-sector employers stubbornly refuse to hire, waiting to be bailed out by consumer spending (70% of the nation’s economic activity), but consumers are tapped out. Meanwhile, official unemployment has not dropped to 8% as promised and predicted, but is instead hovering near 10%, with the unofficial rate, including the underemployed, closer to 17% — nearly one in six workers.

The original stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) spent, or will spend, $787 billion, much of it for eminently worthwhile purposes, but from an immediate jobs perspective, the bulk of the spending has been wholly ineffective. For instance, the roughly one-third foolishly

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designated for tax cuts was a $288 billion, jobs-neutral addition to the national deficit, while the one-third transferred to the states to provide fiscal aid and expand unemployment benefits temporarily saved many existing jobs from the chopping block, but created relatively few new ones. Only the one-third designated for obvious sources of new employment, such as infrastructure, energy, and communications projects, has had an impact, and the jobs created are overwhelmingly blue-collar in nature, problematic in a largely service economy.

According to the most optimistic estimates of the Obama administration, the 2009 stimulus was to have produced 3.5 million jobs; various other experts projected employment gains of closer to 2.5 million. Even if expectations are met, that’s clearly insufficient. Since the start of the Great Recession two years ago, 8.4 million jobs have disappeared; another estimated 2.6 million needed to accommodate interim population growth have failed to materialize, leaving a shortfall of 11 million jobs. And that doesn’t take into account discouraged job seekers, involuntary temps or part-timers, and those already jobless at the start of the downturn; were they added to the mix, says a year-end Federal Reserve study, the shortage of needed full-time positions would swell to 27 million.

The inconvenient truth is that the administration, betraying little sense of urgency and a remarkable lack of political acumen, deliberately engineered a slow-motion jobs program not scheduled to entirely kick in for several years. Here’s White House economic guru Lawrence Summers, quoted last November in the Washington Post: “We always recognized that America’s problems were not created in a week or a month or a year and that they were not going to be solved quickly .... We designed the Recovery Act to

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet us with defense, to ensure the public welPush Back fare, to protect us from the rapaciousness of big business and massive concentrations and Protest of power.

Noam Chomsky, the linguist and poiberals have ceded the moment. The liberal establishment has been operating too long in the thin air of amoral political expediency, standing with the Democrats and the president even when the Democrats and president have sold out progressive goals for short-term political gain.

On financial reform, the environment, job creation and, most spectacularly, healthcare reform, the liberal establishment has looked over the political landscape, identified potential obstacles and punted.

This has allowed the tea-partiers to gain a foothold, to push a narrative about government that paints it as a foreign, antagonistic force. Government, however, is not inherently bad. The problem in the United States is that the corporate order has taken it over and the citizenry has lost the ability to set priorities and influence its actions.

That is the issue with health care. Our corporate-run, profit-driven system has nothing to do with health or care. It is about money. Insurance companies make money by collecting premiums and then refusing care. It is a simple equation.

But rather than dismantling the system and building a new one that does not use profit as primary incentive, we have reform that entrenches the corporate order, funneling suitcases full of cash to big insurance.

All because we remain wed to a reactionary narrative that should have been tossed atop the junk heap of history with Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008, a narrative that has distorted our understanding of how government actually functions, what its role is and why we need it as a bulwark against corporate power.

Corporate power, after all, is the evil here, and not government as a theoretical entity. Government is not separate from the people; it is the people, working collectively to bolster their power, to provide

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litical theorist, said in 1997 that government was the only entity he knew of that could level the playing field for citizens in their dealings with the corporate world. He defined himself as an anarchist and intensely suspicious of concentrated power.

But he also wanted to make it clear that power concentrated in the hands of a profit-driven corporate order was far more of a threat to individual liberty and wellbeing than the growth of a regulatory state.

“There are plenty of good arguments, in my opinion, against centralized government authority,” he told John Nichols in an interview in the Madison Capital Times.

“On the other hand, there’s a much worse danger right outside. The centralized government authority is at least to some extent under popular influence, and in principle at least under popular control.

The unaccountable private power outside is under no public control.”

He called our love affair with privatization and the markets and our willingness to cede decision-making power to private interests “a kind of corporate mercantilism” that merges government and the private sector and enforces “social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors.”

Democratic government, government of the people and by the people, is the bulwark, the collective will and embodiment of the people. By its nature, it has a responsibility to defend those things that are or should be human rights: free speech and expression, privacy and personal safety and the right to feel secure in our homes, obviously, but also freedom from want and hunger, access to medical and preventative care, a clean environment, etc.

A system that views economic efficiency as the highest of goals, that is willing to consign millions to a metaphorical poorhouse as it gobbles up more land,

16 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

ramp up over time, through 2010, and to make sure that the investments we made were important for the country’s future.”

Spoken like a guy with job security and no financial worries.

What earlier administrations facing economic crises understood was that stimulus programs had two purposes: they had to address long-term structural dislocations to be sure, but — and this was recognized as equally important — they also had to provide immediate help to capitalism’s victims, help that was visible enough to furnish the providers with some political benefit as a side effect. The initial Obama stimulus may well achieve the first of these objectives (the evidence is not yet in), but it has fallen flat on the second.

Contrast the Obama team’s deliberate, unhurried response to the current recession with the Roosevelt administration’s prompt, vigorous reaction to the Great Depression. Within eight months of taking office in March 1933, FDR had spurred the New Deal Congress to create the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and before the year was out over 4 million previously unemployed Americans were already at work on a broad range of labor-intensive public-works projects.

Activist critics of the Obama administration’s overly cautious approach — Christina Romer, head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, approvingly calls it “a posture of watchful waiting” — are demanding a more Rooseveltian effort incorporating Works Progress Administration-style government jobs. The Economic Policy Institute has developed a model proposal calling for $40 billion a year over three years to federally hire 1 million of the unemployed for community public works.

Tennessee’s Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen selectively implemented just such a plan last summer, using his state’s stimulus allotment to directly create productive work in one critical high-unemployment area; he reduced local joblessness by nearly a fifth.

A job-saving alternative is the one being pursued by European nations, particularly Germany, which is to have government subsidize workers’ private-sector employment.

Germany’s so-called Kurzarbeit scheme uses unemployment-insurance funds to offset shortened working hours, thereby avoiding full layoffs. A total of 22 member countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have introduced some version of the full-pay shortened work week; the Germans use it to keep their recessionary unemployment around 8%, far below the US rate.

Neither public jobs nor subsidized shorter hours have so far gained policy traction in Washington. Instead, the skimpy, inadequate stimulus supplements working their way through Congress are heavy on tax cuts and not much else. The administration itself is mainly pushing the ultimately defeatist orthodox strategy of a business tax credit for hiring combined with an extension of jobless benefits, while accepting (through spokesperson Romer) that unemployment will remain at 10% through 2010 and drop only to 9% in 2011. The White House, it appears, is ready to live with those results.

That’s woefully short of the needed response. Imagination and daring are what’s lacking. Suppose, for example, the $200 billion remaining in the TARP fund were put to good use by creating or preserving jobs rather than saved for future bank bailouts. FDR would doubtless approve.

taints more water, enslaves and kills more and more people and generally equates power with money is not just absurd but deadly, both physically and spiritually.

Our only hope is to push back, to protest, to demand a restructuring of society that respects and protects our individual autonomy and engages our spirit. We must become rebels, as Chris Hedges pointed out in a column on Truthdig in March, men and women who “refuse to be either a victim or an executioner” and “have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate.” That, he says, “offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning.”

“Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at

the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love,” he wrote. “And in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that ‘existence is an act of rebellion.’ Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.”

And they may just take the rest of society down with them.

JOHN BUELL Building Productive Enterprise emember when the US model of “flexible” labor markets, deregulated transportation, and innovative finance was supposed to be an example to the world? Freed from the constraints of minimum wages, burdensome product regulations, and troublesome unions, American corporations would develop qualitatively superior products at competitive prices.

Today our financial architecture is in shambles and the US is easily surpassed in most measures by such social democratic pariahs as Sweden and Germany, where unions are strong and wages — and vacation time — relatively generous. Meanwhile, what has happened to the core productive capacity in the US? Why have corporate managements failed to deliver on the promise of unleashing new waves of product innovation and productivity enhancements?

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Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine.

Hank Kalet is a poet and newspaper editor in central New Jersey. E-mail grassroots@comcast.net; blog, www.kaletblog.com.

Writing in the February issue of Dollars and Sense magazine, University of California at Chico economist Michael Perelman points out that the US does lead the world in one category. That leadership role does a lot to explain our current travails. US corporations rely on a far higher percentage of supervisory personnel than any other advanced economy. In 1890, supervisory workers made up less than 1% of the US labor force. Today they represent nearly 16%. “Rather than empower workers to take on more responsibility, employers restrict workers’ autonomy by relying instead on guard labor, supervisors.”

Examples abound, and some may provide possible clues to recent news items. Perelman cites work on the introduction of computer controls in the paper industry. When these were first introduced the system was accessible even by frontline production workers. Workers used this new information to make profitable modifications of the production process, but management soon moved to limit access.

Why? Doesn’t profit maximization drive management? The real question is profits for whom. In our current political economy, where ownership and control of capital assets is concentrated in a few hands (sometimes even stockholders have little voice) corporate executives worry about workers who become too knowlContinued on next page

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Greenspan’s Nightmare Is Much of the World’s Dream Unwarranted Fears of Inflation Could Threaten Recovery

By MARK WEISBROT lan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare. Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end. This was 2007, when he published his auto-biographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. Despite his wellknown love for economic data, and poring over the latest reports from every statistical agency, he did not realize that he was sitting on a housing bubble of epic proportions. Not seeing the bubble (he also missed the prior stock market bubble that accumulated and burst on his watch, causing the 2001 downturn), he could not know that it would soon collapse and cause a very ugly recession, in which inflation would be irrelevant.

This by itself should be enough to question the wisdom of central bankers, since the evidence for both of these worldhistoric asset bubbles was blindingly obvious once they had reached a certain size.

But Greenspan’s nightmare is scary for other reasons, some of which will become increasingly relevant as the world economy recovers.

As Greenspan details in his book, the reason for his nightmare is that the world was depleting its stock of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, including those of the former Soviet Union and also in rural China. In other words, “too many” of them had become employed, and this was allowing for wages of factory workers in China to rise. So long as China had a huge mass of unemployed, wages were held in check, and — according to Greenspan — competition from low-wage production there held down wages in the rest of the world, including even rich countries like the United States. All good! Until the nightmare started.

Is there something wrong with this picture, that one of the world’s most powerful economic decision makers (at the

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Buell ...

Continued from preceding page edgeable. “To admit that workers have something to contribute—besides blindly carrying out the demands of management—undermines the ultimate rationale for management’s dominance.” Equally, knowledgeable workers are in a better position to demand higher wages. Broadening worker control of the production process may increase sales and total revenue, but management and stockholders may find they receive a smaller share of that increased pie. Thus capital markets and even many banks are often wary of lending money to such “unconventional” enterprises. In addition, beyond these narrowly economic motives, the exercise of power can become intoxicating in itself, a source of entrenched personal identity.

What are the consequences of workplaces organized around management prerogatives and distrust of workers? Most of us don’t like taking orders or being treated as naturally devious or stupid. The rise of guard labor is not an inevitable feature of modern technology. The US employs about twice the percentage of supervisory personnel as does Sweden. Not only does the proliferation of supervisors add costs, it wastes worker’s capacities and sometimes even channels them into destructive ends.

The Los Angeles Times reports on unsuccessful efforts by production line Toyota

time), dreads the decline of mass unemployment and rising wages among people making 80 cents an hour? What, then, is the purpose of economic development, if not to raise living standards for poor people? Some may dismiss Greenspan’s values as unrepresentative — he was, after all, a devotee of the extreme libertarian writer Ayn Rand. And his auto-biographical narrative is rather unusual: although we learn about his love of baseball, music (he attended the Julliard School), and how he became interested in economics, there is something missing. Most public figures of his stature, and even most economists, would have offered at least a perfunctory paragraph about how his economic thinking was aimed at helping those at the bottom of the social ladder - whether true or not. Greenspan didn’t bother.

But unfortunately Greenspan is not an outlier but a moderate among central bankers. What is worse, their perverse world view has a hugely disproportionate influence on reporting and discussion of economic issues. As the press has recently reported, wages in China are again rising, due to the additive effect of the global economic recovery and the world’s most effective economic stimulus program, which enabled China to plow right through the world recession with 8.7% growth in 2009. The reports are somewhat less negative than they were a few years ago, but Greenspan’s nightmare is everywhere: a dreaded “labor shortage” is forcing Chinese wages up and this will add to inflation. It is not clear what is wrong with a “labor shortage” being resolved in the way that markets resolve other shortages: i.e. the price of labor goes up until quantity supplied matches quantity demanded.

“China has drained its once vast reserves of unemployed workers in rural areas and is running out of fresh laborers for its factories,” reported the New York Times (Feb. 27). “Personnel managers here say they are also abandoning the informal tradition of not hiring anyone over 35 — they say they are now hiring workers up to 40 years old, and sometimes older, despite concerns about whether they can keep up week after week with the rapid pace of Chinese assembly lines.”

“Managers can no longer simply provide eight-to-a-room dorms and expect laborers to toil 12 hours a day, seven days

workers to call management’s attention to persistent quality problems years in advance of current recalls. In response to persistent and often demeaning supervision, workers in certain historical junctures have rebelled. Perelman cites a late sixties auto plant where workers revolted against the production of a poorly designed car. When management rejected their suggestions they initiated a counter plan by deliberately omitting parts.

The implications of this management model go beyond the individual firm.

Perelman points out that one consequence of the decline of US manufacturing has been shrinking incentives to invest in productive activity here. When businesses are less innovative in quality and cost, customers are lost, and workers see their incomes decline. Capital then turns to finance, where the wealthy devise new schemes to loan money to a stretched middle and working class. Finance comes to represent a large share of corporate profits, dominates politics, and pushes a strong dollar, thereby further hurting exports.

The finance bubble, full of deceit and manipulation, has itself been one leg of a squishy productive model. Important as it is to reform and rebuild finance, workers’ gaining a stronger voice and stake in productive enterprise is equally vital.

a week,” says Business Week.

There is more, but we wouldn’t want to give Alan Greenspan a heart attack.

To its credit, the Times recognizes the positive aspect of rising wages for Chinese workers and also notes that the Obama administration, which has complained about the Chinese renminbi being undervalued, should welcome this development. An increase in Chinese wages, to the extent that it raises the price of the country’s exports, has the same impact as an appreciation of the renminbi.

But the reality is that the Obama administration, as well as Congressional leaders, are not really serious about a more competitive dollar. If they were, they could push down the value of the dollar worldwide, rather than trying to blame the Chinese for our overvalued currency. But they

don’t do that because the Greenspan/Wall Street view prevails: anything that lowers inflation is good, whether it’s an overvalued dollar, cheap imports from repressed overseas labor, or US workers’ wages stagnating, as they have, for decades.

All this despite the fact that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects inflation over the next ten years averaging less than 1.7% annually — lower than any decade for more than half a century. Imaginary threats of inflation could turn out to be one of the more real threats to the United States’ economic recovery.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (cepr.net), in Washington, D.C. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy (justforeignpolicy.org).

This originally appeared at guardian.co.uk.

Criminalizing a Drink of Water

By PAUL F. deLESPINASSE he pursuit of “illegal aliens” has become a high government priority. Congress has made it illegal to hire an “undocumented” alien who has managed to get into the US. Although discrimination in other contexts is illegal, for the undocumented it is mandatory.

Impeccable logic underlies this requirement. A major reason people want to move here is our employment opportunities and higher wages. If you cannot be hired, sneaking in is much less attractive.

Mandatory employment discrimination cannot do the whole job, especially since enforcement has been sporadic and half-hearted. So auxiliary measures are needed, and a recent court decision in Arizona illustrates what some of these measures might look like.

In June 2009, a federal jury convicted Walt Staton of littering. His “littering” consisted of leaving jugs of fresh drinkable water in an area near the Mexican border for entering aliens who might otherwise have died from dehydration (as a great many indeed have).

The 27-year-old graduate student was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, a year’s probation and banned from the National Wildlife Refuge in which he had done his evil deeds.

The logic behind making it a criminal act to give someone a drink of water is also impeccable. If more “illegals” die from thirst, this will make crossing into the US less attractive and reduce the burden of policing the border.

It is clear what the next step needs to be: We must make it a criminal act to give or sell food to anybody who cannot document that they are a citizen or here with official government approval.

After that, I am not certain. Allowing or requiring everybody to shoot down undocumented people on the spot might, by more soft-hearted Americans, be regarded as going a little too far. But this, too, would be a logical response to a problem that so many people are concerned about.

I guess the real question is: Once we assume that such a category of people as “illegal aliens” is a legal and moral possibility, where do we draw the line in doing something about it?

An alternative which would not require us to draw any such line would be to abandon the whole concept of an illegal alien and regard every human being on the planet as a member of the human race and a citizen of the world. Inside the United States no matter what state we were born in, we automatically acquire state citizenship merely by moving there. Thus I was a citizen of Michigan for 36 years despite having been born in Oregon, and my wife is a citizen of Oregon despite her birth in Connecticut. There is no reason why this system could not work at the world level, and I am sure that at some future time we will have such a system.

In the meantime we have to live with a different system, but we need to recognize just how crazy this system is and the impossible choices with which it confronts us.

Christians, for example, including fundamentalists (perhaps especially fundamentalists!), need to think about the implications of their faith here: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me ...” (Matthew 25:35) Does anybody really want to live in a world where it is illegal to give a fellow human being a drink of water?

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Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science at Adrian College in Michigan. See his blog: (gusquibble.blogspot.com).

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes regularly on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010 — 17

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THE AMERICAS/Roberto Rodriguez The vast majority of Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Central Americans and “Hispanics/Latinos” are not white.

Census: Latinos Can Identify as Indigenous hroughout the years, to prove to government officials the indigeneity of Mexican and Central American peoples, I have had to resort to using the imagery of ancient pyramids. Unquestionably, it was the ancestors of Mexicans and Central Americans who built them — and who built them were indigenous peoples, not Caucasians.

Try telling that to Jesse Acosta, chairman of the El Paso Complete Count Committee, who, in a recent story in the El Paso Times, estimated that about 98% of Hispanics in El Paso are Caucasian. This is perhaps evidence that this misinformation has not yet been consigned to the pages of history. Either that or perhaps there is an acute shortage of mirrors in that part of the

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ALEXANDER COCKBURN Latin America?

Enough of talk about a new era. So far as Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard.

Are Obama and Hillary Really Bumblers? re they really bumblers? The opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election presaged a substantive shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case.

It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the traditional welcome — a pledge by Israel to build more settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.

At least Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of spit, like Vice President Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, rejecting Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and call for tougher action towards Iran. Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Latin Americans and even some Democratic members of the US Congress listened incredulously to Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly peaceful election of Honduras’ new, USsanctioned President Lobo in a process to which both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers.

Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure with the US with stentorian protests about Obama’s friendliness towards the

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country.

I have had to use this imagery of pyramids because nothing else seems to work.

Rather than use something ancient, I would rather use something living. But even before that, the good news is that this year, for the 2010 Census, if these peoples check the American Indian racial category (question #9), the Bureau will not interfere with the answer.

But back to the question as to whether these peoples are indigenous, native or American Indian? The obvious answer is that the vast majority of Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Central Americans and most “Hispanics/Latinos” are not white.

Among these populations, there indeed are a small minority of Caucasians, but the vast majority of Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Central Americans are either indigenous, or “indigenous-based mestizos” (relative to the indigenous and African populations, not that many Europeans have historically migrated to the Americas). Some scholars refer to these populations not as mestizos but as “de-Indigenized” indigenous peoples. Because most have never been given the choice or opportunity to make these choices, many have historically checked “other race,” only for census officials to redirect them into the white category.

The image I would like to utilize to better illustrate this answer is the following:

Dalai Lama. The PRC continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in US Treasury bonds.

The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a vote in a US congressional committee to recognize the massacre of the Armenians in 1916 as “genocide.” Russia signals its grave displeasure with Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. “We object to any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another’s future,” she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the US would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Is this partial list a reflection of incompetence, or a registration that, with a minor hiccup or two, US foreign policy under Obama is moving purposively forward in its basic enterprise: to restore US credibility in the world theater as the world’s premier power after eight years of poor management?

Consider the situation that this Democratic president inherited. In January 2009, the world was reeling amid violent economic contraction. Obituaries for the American Century were a dime a dozen.

The US dollar’s future as the world’s reserve currency was written off with shouts of contempt. Imperial adventuring, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, were routinely denounced as fit only for Kipling buffs. The progressives who voted Obama in were flushed with triumph and expectation.

Not much more than a year later, Obama has smoothed off the rough edges of Bush-era foreign policy, while preserving and indeed widening its goals, those in place through the entire postwar era since 1945.

Latin America? Enough of talk about a new era, led by Chavez of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia and other progressive leaders. So far as Uncle Sam is concerned, this is still his backyard. On the campaign trail in 2008, it was Republican John McCain who was reviled as the lobbyist for Colombia’s death squad patron, Uribe.

Today, it’s Obama who presides over an adamantly pro-Uribe policy, supervising a widening of US military basing facilities in Colombia. As an early signal of continuity, Honduras’ impertinent president Zelaya, guilty of populist thoughts, was briskly evicted with US approval and behind-the-

18 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

A few years ago, Julieta Villegas, a visiting elder at Nahuatl University in Morelos, Mexico, told some Mexican-American educators that were there to learn the Nahuatl language this: “Most of you have lost your original [Indigenous] language, culture and ways, but do not for one second doubt that you are Indigenous. If you ever do, eat a tortilla.”

So how did Mexican and Central American peoples “become white” upon entering into the United States? They didn’t. This happens only on paper, including census forms and birth certificates, etc. It also happens when they are lumped into a broader category known as Latinos/Hispanics. In some parts of South America, there are higher concentrations of whites, but even there, several countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, etc have even higher concentrations of indigenous peoples. Many Caribbean countries have higher concentrations of black or African ancestry.

Historically, government officials have steered peoples from these backgrounds — despite their heavily Indigenous backgrounds — away from the American Indian or “other” race categories and into the white categories. A smaller percentage are steered into the black categories.

Not this year and not this 2010 Census, says Nicholas Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch of the US Census Bureau.

Unlike previous census counts, he stated that Mexicans, Central Americans or Hispanics/Latinos who check the American Indian racial category will be counted as American Indians.

scenes stage management.

If ever there was a nation for whose enduring misery the US bears irrefutable responsibility (along with France), it is Haiti. The hovels that fell down in the earthquake were those of people rendered destitute by US policies since Jefferson, and most notably by the man to whom Obama is most often compared, another Nobel Peace Prize-winning US President, Woodrow Wilson. The houses that did not fall down in such numbers were those of the affluent elites, most recently protected

by Bill Clinton, who was second only to Wilson in the horrors he sponsored in Haiti. Yet under Obama, the US is hailed as a merciful and generous provider for the stricken nation, even though it has been

Cuba and Venezuela who have been the stalwarts, with doctors (in the case of Cuba) and total debt forgiveness (in the case of Venezuela). The US refused such debt relief.

Israel? Not one substantive twitch has discommoded the benign patronage of Israel by its patron, even though Obama stepped into power amidst Israel’s methodical war crimes — later enumerated

by Judge Goldstone for the UN — in Gaza.

Consistent US policy has been to advocate a couple of mini-Bantustans for the Palestinians, and under Obama, the US has endured no substantive opposition to this plan from its major allies.

With Iran, there is absolute continuity with the Bush years, sans the noisy braggadocio of Cheney: assiduous and generally successful diplomatic efforts to secure international agreement for deepening sanctions; disinformation campaigns about Iran’s adherence to international treaties, very much in the Bush style of

End of debate. The Census asks an ethnicity question (#8) and a racial question (#9). It does not ask a cultural question. Thus, if Chicanos, Mexicans, Central Americans, Puerto Ricans or peoples from South America feel like acknowledging their indigenous racial roots, they now have that right.

If they are de-indigenized or far-removed from their indigenous culture, that is not of interest to the bureau. For those who have a direct connection, they can check American Indian and write in their affiliation, such as: Aymara, Quechua, Mixtec, Maya, Huichol or Yaqui, etc. If they don’t know their affiliation — which is perhaps the case for most Mexicans/Chicanos and Hispanics/Latinos, the bureau will accept “unknown,” “detribalized, “de-indigenized” or “mestizo” or any other term that indicates or connotes Indigenous or American Indian ancestry.

Jones agrees that, if done right, this will not affect the allocation of resources to the nation’s American Indian tribes or members of recognized tribes.

For those previously unrecognized as Indigenous peoples, this is not about resources, but about something very simple: respect and dignity and an acknowledgement that their roots indeed are ancient on this continent.

Roberto “Dr. Cintli” Rodriguez is assistant professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. Email Rodriguez at XColumn@gmail.com or PO Box 85476, Tucson, AZ 85754.

2002. In the interests of overall US strategy in the region, Israel is held on a leash.

No need to labor the obvious about Afghanistan: an enlarged US expeditionary force engineered with one laughable pledge — earnestly brandished by the progressives — that the troops will be home in time for the elections of 2012. The US and, indeed, world antiwar movements live only in memory. Congressional Democrats in the House could barely muster 60 votes against the Afghan War, earlier this week.

Russia? Biden excited the foreign policy commentariat with talk of a “reset” in posture toward Russia. There’s no substantive reset — merely continuation of US policy since the post-Soviet collapse. Last October, Biden emphasized that the US “will not tolerate” any “spheres of influence,” nor Russia’s “veto power” on the eastward expansion of NATO. The US is involved in retraining the Georgian army.

China may thunder about the Dalai Lama and Taiwan — but on the larger stage, the Middle Kingdom’s world heft is much exaggerated. The astute Chinawatcher Peter Lee hit the mark when he wrote recently in Asia Times that “the U.S. is cannily framing and choosing fights that unite the US, the EU, and significant resource producers, and isolate China and force it to defend unpopular positions alone. By my reading, China is pretty much a one-trick pony in international affairs. It offers economic partnership and cash.

What it doesn’t have is what the U.S. has: military reach, moral leadership, heft in the global financial markets (Beijing’s immense overexposure to US government securities is, I think, becoming less of an advantage and more of a liability), or a large slate of loyal and effective allies in international organization.”

The United States, as Lee points out, is also making “good progress in pursuing the most destabilizing initiative of the next 20 years: encouragement of India’s rise from Afghanistan through to Myanmar as a rival and distraction to China.”

All of this is scarcely a catalog of bumbledom. Obama is just what the Empire needed. Plagued though it may be by deep structural problems, he has improved its malign potential for harm — the first duty of all presidents of whatever imagined political stripe.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor of CounterPunch (see www.counterpunch.org or call 800-840-3683).

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IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST/Ralph Nader The Democrats could end the filibuster with a majority vote but they may wish to use this tool of obstruction in the minority.

The Filibuster Flim Flam he US Senate has become the graveyard of Congress! Dozens of bills passed by the House of Representatives — to improve the health, safety and economic well-being of Americans — are locked up in the Senate month after month.

This was not always the case. In the ’60s and ’70s, legislation affecting consumers, workers and the environment often started in the Senate and was sent to the House in the hope that that body would not weaken or defeat these bills.

Committee chairs like Sens. Warren Magnuson, Gaylord Nelson and Walter Mondale would move legislation after great public hearings open to the citizenry.

Auto safety, product safety, meat and poultry inspection, gas pipeline safety in the late sixties, followed by the sweeping air and water pollution control bills in the early seventies, were examples of Senatorial initiatives.

Today, the Senate lies paralyzed even as it is controlled by 59 Democrats — usually enough for comfortable passage of legislation sought by a majority party that also controls the presidency.

A combination of a few reactionary Democratic Senators, a unified pro-corporate Republican opposition, anti-democratic Senate rules and the decades-long weakening of citizen and trade union groups have combined to produce a constipated Senate.

The usually mild House Democratic Caucus Chairman, John Larson (Conn.) showed his irritation recently when he said that people are tired of the House passing legislation that stalls in the Senate.

Some of the bills passed by the House include the financial reform bill regarding Wall Street’s abuses, the omnibus energy bill, a long overdue adjustment of Postal Service pension payments, vision care for children, a job security act for wounded veterans, a paycheck fairness bill, an elder abuse victims bill, a water use efficiency and conservation research bill, an act to prohibit the importation of certain lowlevel radioactive waste into the US, an imposition of additional taxes on executive bonuses awarded by financial companies under bailout salvation, a mortgage reform and anti-predatory lending bill, food safety legislation, stronger enforcement authority for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and a student aid and fiscal responsibility bill.

These are some of the 290 bills already passed in the House—many of them minor to be sure—that House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (Dem. CA.) has noted. (See: http://thehill.com/homenews/sen-

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ate/83057-290-bills) Granted the major House bills are not as strong as some citizen groups would like, which is why they try to get them strengthened in the Senate. Fat chance, as long as Rule 22 — the notorious filibuster mechanism — exists, and as long as the senators remain marinated in corporate campaign cash and prospective jobs for them or their relatives.

The filibuster is now virtual, unlike the traditional filibuster where its practitioners would have to go on the Senate floor for hours straining their bladders and the patience of the public.

Presently, all Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has to do is merely notify Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) of the intent to extend debate and, voila, a minority of 41 senators defeats the majority rule of 59 senators.

So Sen. Reid bewails that: “We had to file cloture some 70 times last year, seventy times. That’s remarkably bad. Let’s change that.”

So why don’t the Democrats “change that?” In 1975, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, in his role as president of the Senate, ruled that 51 senators could amend Senate rules. Sen. Tom Udall (DN.M.) has a resolution to do just that — predictably languishing in the Senate without even a hearing.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) proposed a resolution that would require a series of votes to cut off a filibuster. The first stage would need 60 votes, the second would need 57, then 54 and finally a simple majority over a period of weeks. That proposal is going nowhere.

Obviously, the Democrats could end the filibuster with a majority vote but choose not to because they may wish to use this tool of obstruction should they be in the minority. In fact, Harry Reid has ruled out any filibuster reform. Well then, why not end the “virtual” filibuster and make the Republicans hit the floor with round-the-clock debate televised around the nation. People are waiting and suffering from corporate-desired inaction.

Chicago lawyer and scholar, Thomas Geoghegan wrote an open letter to Sen. Reid urging that he make the Republicans actually filibuster. (See it at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/201002 22/geoghegan_editors) Either make them stall the Senate on a minor bill to generate public ire or generate public outrage by making them filibuster a popular bill aimed at curbing corporate crime, waste and abuse or one that would save people money or their health.

Still, no response, other than debilitating talk by the Democrats about seeking bi-partisan support for their bills.

Face it — the Senate is breaking an already broken Congress into little pieces which are then sold for a mess of pottage.

Organize Congress Watch Locals in every state, folks, for nobody will save you but yourselves.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author. His most recent book is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. Contact him c/o PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036.

See www.nader.org.

TED RALL Why can’t leftwingers be tough?

Tough feels right.

More importantly, tough works. Tough wins.

I Wish I Were a Republican What the Left Could Learn from Party of No amn! I wish I was a man,” sang folksinger Cindy Lee Berryhill in the 1980s. Me, I wish I was a Republican.

Conservatives dress frumpy, are all white and bland and suburbany, and don’t know much about history. But they have more fun than liberals. They stick together.

And they fight for what they believe in (or, more often, they fight against what they’re against).

Right-wingers are tough.

Why can’t left-wingers be tough?

Tough feels right. More importantly, tough works. Tough wins.

So here’s a toast: to guts, glory, and the Party of No. May we learn from them.

Consider where the GOP was ages and ages ago — OK, this is almost embarrassing to say — in November 2008. Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress. Six months later, they were still in trouble, reeling from the defection of Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The GOP, Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post, was in crisis. “[It] hasn’t coalesced around any ideas that weren’t born in the Reagan years. It hasn’t been able to muster the kind of galvanizing policy positions that made the Contract with America a rallying point for Republicans to go toe to toe with President Clinton in the 1990s. And it’s still in search of a leader ... While the party isn’t over for Republicans, it’s getting there.”

What a difference a year of holding firm — and Democratic wankery — makes.

By Jan. 6, 2010, the New York Times reported that Obama and the Democrats were “facing a shifting and perilous political environment that could have big implications for this year’s midterm elections and his own agenda.”

Healthcare is a lose-lose: If it fails, Obama won’t have a single major legislative achievement to his credit by this fall.

If it passes, the details Democrats have managed to keep secret — high deductibles, co-pays, mandated payments to private insurers — will cost them in the midterm elections and possibly in 2012.

Dems are also taking hits for the financial bailouts — ironically, since the first round of banker giveaways began under Bush. But Americans have short memories. And no one is buying Obama’s argument that 20-plus percent underemployment rate would have been even worse without the bailouts.

Going into the 2010 midterm election

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season, right-wingers are fired up by the Tea Party and their thinly-disguised contempt for the fact that a black guy is in the White House. Liberals, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly be less motivated to serve as the Democratic Party base. They see healthcare as a sellout to insurers, hate the bailouts and are disgusted by Obama’s decision (advertised in 2008, but Americans have short memories, dontcha know) to expand the war against Afghanistan. They won’t turn out to vote. As things look now, November 2010 will be a rout.

Capehart was right: the Republicans didn’t have any new ideas.

They didn’t need any.

Voters who back a losing party are angry. But they are realistic. They know their guys are in the minority. They only expect their representatives to do one thing: obstruct the other party as much as possible.

Which is exactly what the Republicans, led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, have done. They have driven Democrats crazy.

As the New York Times put it: “Republicans are monolithically against the health care legislation, leaving the president and his party executing parliamentary back flips to get it passed, conservatives revived, liberals wondering what happened.”

The “party of no,” as liberal commentators slagged the GOP, is unified in its opposition to what it calls big-government, but is in reality opposed to anything the Democrats want. Which is just the way Republican voters like it.

“Their goal,” said Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin of Illinois,” is to slow down activity to stop legislation from passing in the belief that this will embolden conservatives in the next election and will deny the president a record of accomplishment.”

Is that supposed to be criticism?

Sounds to me like they’re making the most of their 41% control of the Senate.

Sounds to me like they’re giving Republican voters a reason to support them.

During the early years of the Bush regime, the Senate was split 50-50. One can’t help admire the unity of today’s 41vote minority Republicans to the passive wimpdom of the 50-vote Senate Democrats of 2001-2002. Bush got everything he wanted: his invasion of Afghanistan, legalized torture, Guantánamo, the USA Patriot Act, tax cuts for the wealthy, the build-up to the Iraq War. Democrats never held as few seats as Republicans hold now—yet they never lifted a finger to slow down Bush’s agenda.

Finally, consider the results. Cowardly Bush-era Dems lost seats in 2002 and 2004. Balls-to-the-wall Obama-era Republicans will almost certainly gain in 2010.

What’s the point of being a Democrat? When they lose, they let the other side have their way. When they win, they do the same.

Democrats will soon have another chance to redeem themselves — as a minority party.

Damn! I wish I were a Republican.

Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir The Year of Loving Dangerously. His website is tedrall.com.

Please tell a friend about The Progressive Populist!

THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010 — 19

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SXSW

What’s Up, Docs?

By JIM CULLEN lthough narrative features get most of the attention at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, which concluded its nine-day run on March 20, for my money documentaries are the better deal. Most of the feature films on the schedule will end up with some theatrical release, or at least DVD release. But you never know when or if you’ll get to see some of the documentaries again. This year — its 17th — festival producer Janet Pierson said she received more than 700 documentary entries for 50 slots out of 4,000 total film entries.

Some of my favorite documentaries from this year’s festival:

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11/4/08. Two weeks before the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, Jeff Deutchman asked friends around the world to record their experiences on Nov. 4, 2008, a day of historic expectations.

Deutchman got back video from amateurs as well as acclaimed filmmakers such as Henry Joost, Margaret Brown, Joe Swanberg and Benh Zeitlin. From the start of voting that Tuesday morning to the declaration of Obama’s victory about 10 p.m. Central time and the celebrations that continued into the following morning, the documentary records events in Chicago, where voting lines are even longer when Obama shows up to cast his own vote. In St. Louis and Austin, idealistic volunteers think they can turn their states blue. In Harlem, a black man confesses that he cannot vote for Obama because he is a felon and he expresses doubt that Obama’s election can affect his life anyway. Another man replies that it might not affect him, but it will have an impact on a generation of black children for whom the nation’s highest office is no longer out of the question. In Dubai, people are skeptical that Obama will amount to much change in Mideast policy. In Paris, a group discusses whether there could ever be a black president of France. In Berlin, Geneva and New Delhi, expatriates express their hopes.

After seven years of George W. Bush burning the goodwill that was accorded the United States after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the world had high hopes for Obama. A woman in Geneva put it succinctly: “He is the American dream and the world loves America because it loves your dreams.” In the past year and a half, in the face of intractable Republican opposition, perhaps those dreams have gotten a little more realistic, but still — wasn’t that a night, where the world watched Obama claim victory in Chicago’s Grant Park, and anything seemed possible?

Deutchman continues to solicit raw footage of that election day and night at 114-08.com.

Ain’t In It for My Health. Director Jacob Hatley was originally hired to make a music video for Levon Helm, the former drummer and vocalist for The Band, to promote his CD, Dirt

Farmer. But Hatley stuck around for a year and a half to tape Helm’s storytelling and ended up with a fascinating story of Helm’s battle with throat cancer, his bankruptcy, slowing down from his partying past, the deaths of bandmates Richard Manuel and Rick Danko and his conflicted feelings when he was notified that he would receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, which he ended up rejecting as just an attempt by “suits” to drum up sales. He had mixed emotions about The Band’s legacy, stemming from personal disputes with bandleader Robbie Robertson. Helms was the only member of The Band from the US and Hatley argues that his Southern heart and soul was the root of The Band’s success.

American: Bill Hicks. Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas use video from Hicks’ performances as well as animation using photos of family and friends to bring the outlaw comic back to life. The film explores his journey from a teenager in Houston who had to sneak out of his house to attend his first open-mike tryout at a local comedy club and follows Hicks as he his experiments with drugs and alcohol expanded his consciousness but eventually sent him on a downward spiral.

Hicks wore out his welcome at many US clubs before he got clean. He found new audiences in Canada and Britain and returned as the outlaw who skewered the contradictions of America and modern life, the hypocrisies of government and the collusion of mainstream media. He was finally achieving wider recognition when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 1993 at age 32.

His last appearance on Late Night with David Letterman on Oct. 1, 1993, was cut from the show, allegedly because religious jokes made Letterman and his producer nervous. Hicks died five months later. Fifteen years later, Letterman invited Hicks’ mother on his show on Jan. 30, 2009, to apologize and Hicks’ routine finally aired in its entirety.

(It is available on Youtube.com.)

And Everything is Going Fine. Director Steven Soderbergh, who collaborated with Spalding Gray on his filmed stream-of-consciousness memoir monologue, Gray’s Anatomy, in 1996, has sifted through 15 hours of footage recorded in 25 years before Gray’s apparent suicide by drowning in 2004 and distilled the videos to give Gray a final 92minute monologue tracking universal truths via his favorite subject: himself.

Beijing Taxi. Director Miao Wang follows the lives of three taxi drivers to examine the changing times and values of the Chinese capital as it is transformed in the two years leading up to the Beijing Olympics. The cabbies include a veteran of Mao’s Cultural Revolution who now has health problems and is trying to survive the transformation to Chinese capitalism until he is able to retire; a younger man whose aging taxi keeps breaking down, causing him to lose his taxi permit as the

Did America’s Founders Want Government Small?

By SAM PIZZIGATI he pillars of American conservative thought and action—top officials from over a dozen national groups—assembled along the Potomac last month.

At Northern Virginia’s historic Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, these luminaries met to “recommit” themselves to the one ideal they believe all conservatives can share. That ideal: small government.

“Through the Constitution,” the solemn conservatives declared in a position paper they dubbed the Mount Vernon Statement, “the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law.”

That “principle of limited government,” the Mount Vernon Statement urges, ought to be applied to “every proposal” that comes before America’s lawmakers.

Americans of a more progressive bent tend, of course, to consider all this solemnity around the “principle of limited government” as just so much mumbojumbo, meant to keep the rich and powerful safe from any challenge to their wealth and power.

And progressives also don’t much appreciate conservative moves to claim the generation of 1776 as the

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Olympics approach; and a young mother who drives a cab but is eager to start her own clothing business in the economic boom leading up to the Olympics. Wang, a native of Beijing, left China in 1990 for the US but went back every five years, watching more of her childhood city disappear with each visit.

Camp Victory, Afghanistan, by director Carol Dysinger tells the story of US National Guardsmen stationed in Herat, Afghanistan, to train Afghan officers and sergeants to build the 207th Corps into an institution capable of providing stability, peace and justice in a volatile nation. The Americans are faced with an Afghan army 80% of whose enlistees are illiterate, simply seeking a job and not entirely trustworthy when it comes to fighting the Taliban but the Americans grow to respect their mentees even as they doubt that they accomplished much.

For the Sake of the Song: The Story of Anderson Fair. Filmmakers Bruce Bryant and Jim Barham spin the story of generations of artists, volunteers and patrons who have made Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant a cultural treasure in the Montrose area of Houston that has nurtured singer-songwriters for 40 years. Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams are among the artists who played for dinner and the “door” and/or tip jar. The film tells how the close-knit “family” transformed a politically subversive coffee house and restaurant in the 1970s into a musical institution that today is one of the oldest acoustic venues in continuous operation in the US. The restaurant has never made much money — in fact, it frequently had to be bailed out financially — but it has succeeded with a common vision that nothing gets in the way of the music. The film features new and archival footage of performances and interviews by Vince Bell, Guy Clark, Slaid Cleaves, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Steven Fromholz, Carolyn Hester, Robert Earl Keen, Eric Taylor, Dave Van Ronk, Townes Van Zandt, Griffith, Lovett and Williams. The producers said the film’s release may be held up pending final clearance of music rights, but they are hoping.

Haynesville tells the story of what the discovery of the largest natural gas field in the United States does to a community in northwest Louisiana. The documentary follows three people: a single mom who defends her community’s interests against the threat of groundwater contamination by the drilling process and seeing that property owners are not cheated out of their share of gas royalties; an African American preacher who attempts to use the money spread around by the project to build a school; and a self-described “country boy” who weighs the cost of losing his beloved 300 acres of woodlands against becoming an overnight millionaire. In addition to following these characters, Gregory Kallenberg, a former newspaper re-

original carriers of the conservative torch. But rightwingers, on this one, have a point. The founders, the most progressive of them included, did believe in limited government. The question for us today: Why? Today’s conservatives don’t bother with that question, and for good reason, as historian James Huston explained over a decade ago in his still timely epic, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution 1765-1900: The founders believed in “limited government” because they wanted to limit what today’s conservatives celebrate — the concentration of wealth.

America’s revolutionaries had read their history.

Every previous attempt to establish republican rule, they knew, had failed. Athens. Rome. Venice. Florence. The cause of that failure, as the founders saw it: a deep and divisive maldistribution of wealth.

The founders came to believe, notes Huston, that a republic could only endure with “an equal or nearly equal distribution of landed wealth among its citizens.”

OK, at least the land-owning white male citizens, but bear with me.

To the generation of 1776, equity seemed nature’s way. Most colonials lived on small, semi-subsistence family farms. In this overwhelmingly agrarian setting, grand fortunes hardly ever accumulated. Some farmers did work harder than others, but the earth could yield, no matter how much work was performed upon it, only so

20 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

porter, interviews academics, journalists and environmentalists to explore the role natural gas from the Haynesville Shale field could play in providing a bridge from petrochemical-based energy to a more sustainable renewable energy policy for the United States.

The People vs. George Lucas. If you are of the generation that grew up with the first three “Star Wars” movies there is a good chance you have strong opinions about what George Lucas did not only with the prequel trilogy but also in tinkering with the original trilogy. Director Alexandre Phillippe used crowdsourcing to lure hundreds of hours of Star-Wars-themed fan videos — featuring 3D animation, claymation, puppets and childrens drawings — rants and interviews to examine the conflicted dynamic between Lucas and his fans over the past three decades, from the Star Wars originalists to the new generation, many of whom see nothing wrong with Jar Jar Binks. The film amounts to a love letter/indictment of Lucas’ handling of the Star Wars legacy. Me? I’m a Trekkie.

The Red Chapel. Mads Brügger, a Danish journalist with few apparent scruples, impersonates a theatrical producer to get permission to travel to North Korea with two Danish-Korean standup comedians, one of whom is a self-described spastic. Their mission: to test censorship in one of the world’s most notoriously totalitarian regimes under the pretext of being a socialist theatrical troupe, “The Red Chapel,” on a cultural exchange visit from Denmark. The troupe was given permission to travel to Pyongyang to perform at special events for selected audiences. In North Korea the Danes are assigned Korean minders who monitor their every move. Every night the minders examine the video the Danes shoot to make sure there is no objectionable content, but the would-be censors are stymied by the Danish dialogue, particularly Jacob’s garbled speech. The Danish Koreans offer an intentionally lame vaudeville-style comic song-and-dance routine, only to see it taken over and transformed by the official Korean director into an even lamer routine. As they get closer to the performance, Jacob, the “spastic” protégé, has fits of conscience where he rebels against Brügger’s ruses. You almost feel sorry for Mrs. Pak, the Korean minder who smothers Jacob with motherly affection and bursts into tears at the mention of North Korean patriotism. Almost.

World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements. Director Chris Farina follows elementary schoolteacher John Hunter as his students in Charlottesville, Va., participate in an educational exercise Hunter invented called the World Peace Game, an interactive experience that makes the 4th graders assume roles as world leaders and leads them to learn how to resolve disputes.

For more on these films, see (www.sxsw.com/film).

much wealth.

That reality, observes historian Huston, had kept gaps in colonial income and wealth relatively limited.

And those gaps would stay limited, the generation of 1776 devoutly believed, so long as all who labored were guaranteed the “fruits of their labor.”

America’s original revolutionaries agreed that republican liberty would surely fail if their new nation ever let elites expropriate what average citizens labored so hard to earn. And how did elites expropriate? By manipulating politics to gain economic advantage. The aristocrats of Europe did that manipulating all the time.

If the economy were just left alone, America’s original revolutionaries believed, equality would grow naturally. No one could ever become fabulously wealthy in an economy where labor, and labor alone, determined a citizen’s worth.

The founders, in sum, cared deeply about the link between democracy and equality and worried that vast extremes of wealth and poverty would doom their new republic. You won’t find one whit of that worry in the new conservative Mount Vernon Statement. The founders wouldn’t be pleased.

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much (toomuchonline.org), the online newsletter on excess and inequality published by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies. Distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.

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a book review

The Man Behind ‘Joey Ramone’

By ROB PATTERSON was born in 1954. Hence I grew up in the 1950s into the ’60s experiencing all the cultural and political currents of those eras. In the mid-to-late 1970s, when I first started writing, my head and musical tastes were turned by the rise of punk rock, which I witnessed from a fairly early point at the movement’s legendary ground zero in Manhattan, CBGB. Hence I’m a sucker for the book I Slept With Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir by Ramone’s younger brother Mickey Leigh with punk scene chronicler Legs McNeil (whose tome Please Kill Me is an essential oral history for anyone interested in the musical and cultural revolution that was New York punk). I’m also well disposed to it as Leigh is (full disclosure) a dear friend, and in my flack days I did PR for his band The Rattlers and an album he released by his previous band Birdland with famed rock critic Lester Bangs as its singer. I also knew and became friendly with Joey in the 1980s.

Even without such associations, I would have been disposed to I Slept With Joey Ramone. As its double entendre title and literal subtitle indicates, it’s anything but the usual rock star bio.

In its early chapters about Joey (Jeff Hyman) and Mickey (Mitchell Hyman) growing up in the ’50s in Queens, N.Y., it’s redolent of my own youth, capturing how that decade felt through a child’s eyes and how rock’n’roll grabbed our attention in a way that compelled us to follow its clarion call. It also conveys the essences of being children of divorce and growing up outside the norm.

As older brother Joey hit his teens, it became obvious that in addition to being physically different with his tall and gangly physique, he suffered from such mental disorders as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and possible touches of psychosis as well as physical challenges and ailments. The experts predicted that he would never amount to much more than an emotional cripple and a burden to society.

But Ramone instead became a progenitor of punk rock and a genuine rock’n’roll icon. Leigh relates with loving candor and insight both the difficulty of living with a troubled older sibling as well as the wonderment of how Joey transformed himself through his love for music.

The origins of The Ramones — including Joey’s hippie past that he sought to bury underneath his punk identity — and their career that never broke into the big time are covered with an insider’s knowledge and insight. The unique characters and internal dynamics of a rock band have rarely been revealed so fully and skillfully.

The book is also a telling tale of sibling love and conflict, and shows how the success and fame that Ramone did achieve affected the relationship between Leigh and Ramone as well as the rest of the family. Since Leigh is also a prodigiously talented musician, songwriter and singer, it also illuminates how some musical artists can make their mark while others remain less known despite their efforts and gifts.

It is capped by the touching rapprochement between the brothers as Ramone fell ill with lymphoma and died in 1991. The Ramones were eventually inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and a city block in New York’s East Village is now named Joey Ramone Place — amazing achievements for someone who was branded a loser early in life.

But behind every star and legend is a real human being, and in rock music they are almost always as flawed as they are gifted. Leigh was in the perfect position to show the full picture of the making of a musical icon, and he does so with insight, love, compassion and unflinching honesty (and proves himself a skillful writer of prose in the process). He also tells a classic American tale of brotherhood and family, warts and all, and the times in which he and his brother and the rest of us have grown up and lived.

Few writers have ever gotten not just “behind the music” but inside it and the people who create it as skillfully and revealingly as Leigh, and the humanity within Joey Ramone’s life story and how Leigh tells it makes this a biography and memoir that soars beyond just the musical connection to offer a story to which most all of us can relate.

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EDGE OF SPORTS/Dave Zirin Root for Ed O’Bannon to Upset the NCAA here is nothing quite like March Madness — not for the sports fan’s pulse, and not for the NCAA’s financial ledger. The NCAA’s television deal with CBS, signed in 2002, is worth $6 billion over 11 years, and, when you add up all the money raised from the tournament — including TV rights, tickets, merchandising and the like - it accounts for an astounding 96% of the college athletic association’s annual revenue.

Of course, the so-called amateur players — without whose labor not one dime would be raised — don’t see a penny above and beyond the scholarships they may be getting to attend school. Until now.

If former UCLA basketball star and 1995 Final Four Most Outstanding Player Ed O’Bannon has anything to say about it, reality is in for a rude awakening. If you really care about college ball — and the kids who play it — you should be rooting for O’Bannon just as you cheer on your alma mater.

First, a quick trip down memory lane: O’Bannon was an outstanding, physically gifted player who gave his knees to college basketball only to fizzle out in the pros. He helped restore UCLA to glory, saw kids wearing his powder-blue and gold jersey, helped generate millions for a school that revolves around hoops — and didn’t see a cent of it.

And he is now the lead plaintiff in a steadily advancing lawsuit to force the NCAA to pay royalties to its former players.

Here’s how it currently works: Right now, the NCAA can license the images, uniforms and even the computer likenesses of anyone who ever played under its umbrella. So O’Bannon and his teammates can be featured in, say, a video game that makes millions — without getting a cut. It’s a business that generates $4 billion annually.

O’Bannon was moved to act after seeing the child of a friend playing a video game — as O’Bannon himself.

“They literally played me on a video game,” O’Bannon told Yahoo! Sports last summer. “You could play the ’95 Bruins. It didn’t have my name, but it had my number, left-handed, it looked like me. It was everything but the name.”

Now O’Bannon is the tip on the spear to make sure that players don’t get the shaft.

There are certainly legitimate debates about whether full tuition constitutes enough payment for any student athlete while the player is in school.

Personally, I think that players should get a portion of the revenue they produce, or at least have their education guaranteed if they leave school early or lose their scholarship because of injury.

But wherever you fall on this question, the idea of the NCAA — which officially is a nonprofit — marketing the images of former players for commercial concerns without sharing the revenue ought to be considered rank piracy. There is no equivalent instance where such a thing would be considered acceptable. Imagine if I started to market “Angelina Jolie Ranchers” without asking the actress for permission or giving her any of the proceeds.

On a more serious note, even in the United States Army, this nonsense is not allowed. When the Pentagon wanted to use the late Pat Tillman in recruitment ads, they couldn’t do it.

In short, the rights for others to exploit or profit from our personhood are protected — unless you happen to be under the auspices of the NCAA. Fortunately, California Federal Judge Claudia Wilken denied the NCAA’s request to dismiss the suit this month and stated that O’Bannon’s case can move forward.

If nothing else, this opens a period of discovery where the NCAA’s financial books, contracts and business deals are now fully open to scrutiny. The NCAA now has to point flashlights in all of its shadowy corners.

Anyone who cares about basic justice for athletes should stand with Ed O’Bannon in his efforts. He has lived the unfairness of this system. This is no cautionary tale. O’Bannon went back to get his degree and today has a happy family life and sells cars in Las Vegas. That’s what makes O’Bannon, and this case, so compelling. It’s not about the money. It’s about what’s right. Just something to think about before we descend into the Madness of March.

POPULIST PICKS/ Rob Patterson Roky Erickson and Okkervil River join in a gorgeous and affirmative album that creates a new psychedelic music.

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Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner) See edgeofsports.com. Email edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Catch ‘The Cove’ VD: The Cove — The Oscar this film about Japan’s dolphin slaughter won should be more than enough reason to see this documentary.

Yes, it’s an uneasy viewing experience, as it should be. But as a polemic and a film it works marvelously, and focuses attention on an inhumane practice that still continues and must — not should — be stopped. It will be shown on the Animal Planet cable channel this summer, followed by a new series it inspired, Dolphin Warriors, hosted by Ric O’Barry, the former Flipper trainer and dolphin activist who stars in The Cove. Hopefully all this will help change consciousness towards our aquatic cousins.

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CD: True Love Cast Out All Evil by Roky Erickson with Okkervil River — Erickson all but invented psychedelic rock music in the mid-1960s with his band The 13th Floor Elevators. He also suffers from schizophrenia and was dealt blows by the mental health establishment, the legal system and the music business that had by the 1990s left him in poverty, untreated for his illness, and close to death.

The miraculous resurrection — detailed in the wonderful 2005 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me that is well worth seeing — of this musical legend over the last decade finds wondrous fruition in this new album he has made with the marvelous young band Okkervil River (also well worth hearing on their own). The songs — many from the time he was incarcerated at a Texas mental hospital for the criminally insane — are sometimes chilling, but they are largely affirmations of love, faith and humanity by a man whose horribly tough and haunted life could have caused him a loss of all that. A gorgeous and affirmative album that creates a new psychedelic music for this century and beyond.

Book: I, Claudius by Robert Graves — I’ve been on an ancient Rome kick of late.

And this superb historical novel written by one of the finest writers in the English language captures the times, culture, people and intrigue of its ruling class brilliantly. I’ve already watched the superb BBC TV series, but there’s nothing like the book in this case.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@io.com.

THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010 — 21

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AMY GOODMAN Open-mindedness was hardly the response of a fringe group called Stop the Madrassa.

NYC’s Jihad Against Debbie Almontaser ebbie Almontaser has won a victory in her battle against discrimination. She was the founding principal of the first Arabic-language public school in the United States, until a campaign of hate forced her out. She is well known for her success in bridging cultural divides, bringing together Muslims, Christians and Jews, yet as the new school neared its opening date in the summer of 2007, she became the target of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks. Last week, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) ruled that the New York City Department of Education (DOE) discriminated against her “on account of

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GARRISON KEILLOR Government can do some good things right and is not a blight upon the land, this ballpark is an enormous pleasure.

Play Ball!

Come April, Minnesotans will be watching the Twins in the sunlight, in a beautiful little bandbox of a new ballpark e have a good guy in the White House, a smart man of judicious temperament and profound ideals, a man with a sweet private life, a man of dignity and good humor, whose enemies, waving their hairy arms and legs, woofing, yelling absurdities, only make him look taller. Washington, being a company town, feasts on gossip, but I think the Democratic Party, skittish as it is, full of happy blather, somehow has brought forth a champion. This should please anyone who loves this country, and as for the others, let them chew on carpets and get what nourishment they can. End of sermonette.

The beauty part of my week (not that you asked) was a visit to the warehouse district north of downtown Minneapolis where, in my boyhood, I used to ride my bike past printing plants and barrelworks, small factories, a slaughterhouse, lumberyards, auto salvage yards, fascinated by the sight of men at work, and where, now, a new ballpark has arisen where, on April 12, though we are still knee-deep in snow, the Minnesota Twins will open the 2010 campaign, against the mighty Red Sox and their nation.

On Monday I snuck into the park through a door left ajar and attached myself to a group of suits on tour and got to see the whole joint, the steep left-field bleachers, the spruce trees in deep center, the skyboxes (each with a porch, so the nabobs can get fresh air), down to the locker room (with batting cage and pitching machine nearby, just like at a carnival), the spot where the statue of Killebrew will stand, and to me, a skeptic when it comes to public works, this

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her race, religion and national origin.”

The school is called the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Gibran was a Lebanese-born writer and philosopher. His best-known book, “The Prophet,” published in 1923, has sold more than 100 million copies in 40 languages. A line from “The Prophet,” prominent on the academy’s website, reads, “The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”

But open-mindedness was hardly the response of a fringe group called Stop the Madrassa. The group used the Arabic word for school because of its negative connotations with religious schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The academy was developed as a secular, dual-language public school for sixth through 12th grades and had no religious curriculum. As the small but vocal group of opponents continued to take issue with the planned school, the DOE compelled Almontaser to submit to an interview with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The article’s headline read: “City Principal Is ‘Revolting.’ ” In the interview, Almontaser was asked to explain the use of the word intifada, because the word appeared on a Tshirt of a women’s organization that sometimes used the offices of a community group where she was a board member. The T-shirt had nothing to do with the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Almontaser told me: “He asked me one or two questions about the school and then

asked me for the root word of the word intifada. As an educator, I simply responded and said to him that it comes from the root word of the word infad in Arabic, which is ‘shake off’; however, this word has developed a negative connotation based on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where thousands of people have died. Within the interview, I stated that I ... condemn all violence, any shape, way or form.”

Her lawyer, Alan Levine, told me: “Debbie was the victim of a smear campaign. ... The bigots in the community had no power to fire; the Department of Education did. They succumbed to the bigots.”

The EEOC report concluded, “DOE succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on DOE as an employer.” Almontaser is seeking reinstatement as principal of the KGIA, along with back pay, damages and legal fees. The New York City Law Department has vowed to fight her. Levine hopes for a settlement, but is prepared to file a lawsuit, saying: “The EEOC, which has no ax to grind [and] is the country’s premier agency with regard to employment discrimination claims, says that they did discriminate. I’ll go with the EEOC. I’m confident that a judge or jury will.” Days after the EEOC letter was delivered, the non-Arab-American principal of the KGIA stepped down, without explanation, and was replaced by an Arab-American educator.

Three years ago, in the midst of the

firestorm, a group of prominent Jewish leaders, including 15 rabbis, wrote an open letter to the Jewish community in support of Almontaser, saying, “We seek your support and respect for a colleague and friend who has suffered and continues to suffer from a disturbing and growing prejudice in our midst ... her return to her children [at the KGIA] will only bring greater peace and understanding between people of all faiths in our educational system and in our city as a whole.” This case, as a metaphor, has broader implications, as protests continue in the streets of Jerusalem following the Israeli announcement of thousands of new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem, blindsiding Vice President Joe Biden as he began a peacemaking visit there.

Almontaser told me, “It’s my life’s dream ... to lead a school, to establish an institution that would set precedents in helping building bridges of understanding and certainly creating young people who will be global thinkers, competing in the 21st century work force.” Hers is a vision the New York City Department of Education should embrace, with her prompt reinstatement.

looks to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, a temple on the order of Wrigley or Fenway or the Acropolis, a beautiful little bandbox of a ballpark tucked snugly into streets of old warehouses and the Burlington railyards, with commuter trains running to its front door, a sight that fills me with unmitigated dizzy delight.

We Minnesotans have been watching baseball in a basement for 28 years, under a fabric dome on a plastic field designed for football, and come April, we’ll be sitting in sunlight, or under the stars, with the handsome towers of downtown Minneapolis just beyond center field, and we’ll mill on the great concourse just behind the loge seats and eyeball the game while ordering a steak sandwich or an old-fashioned Schweigert hot dog. Hallelujah. Wowser.

That this beauty was accomplished through public financing — $392 million of the $544 million total paid through a sales tax approved by the Legislature — is some sort of triumph, and to an old Democrat like me, who believes that govern-

ment can indeed do some good things right and is not a blight upon the land, this ballpark is an enormous pleasure, and so I headed south to my favorite medical clinic to make sure I’d live until Opening Day. Southern Minnesota was fully swathed in snow. I listened to the Beatles’ White Album on the way down to Rochester, past miles of small farms where people live by stern realities that don’t forgive mistakes easily, listening to playful music (“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” “Rocky Raccoon,” etc.) from back when I was a bright young thing, before I got ponderous and hoofy. At the clinic I was tapped and bled and X-rayed and examined and some barnacles were removed by freezing with liquid nitrogen, and that was all good. When you hang out at a medical clinic, you notice the thoughtful people around you sitting in prayerful silence, and you see scenes of pure marital devotion, a healthy mobile spouse pushing an immobilized one, and the banter of camaraderie of the long married, though one is in dire straits and the

other apparently not. The stern realities of life, for all to see.

And then I was sprung loose. They opened the gate and slapped my haunch and I raced north toward the city, toward April 12, toward spring and summer and the bright future of the beloved country. It was during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that I smelled the skunk. He expressed himself powerfully, richly, for almost a mile. Nothing says spring like a big stink. A Republican skunk protesting big government, and he got in the way of a big vehicle that knocked him out of this world, and I wish his species well but did not stop for the memorial service.

Healthcare?

Done. Next Up: The Banks

pen. Either a deal is made that further undermines a bill that most serious advocates of regulatory reform already consider too weak, or the Obama administration puts enough pressure on the GOP to get someone to break ranks.

Given the Republican intransigence on healthcare reform, the possibility of a GOP defection would appear to be infinitesimal. But the Obama administration is in a much stronger position on financial regulatory reform than it was on healthcare. In part this is simply because winning the battle on healthcare reform created some much needed momentum, but it’s also because financial reform is a much less divisive issue. Nearly everyone, on both parties, agrees that something must be done. And something will be done.

The Obama administration is already signaling that it is ready to turn up the pressure. Let’s turn the mike over to a senior administration official, speaking on March 22 about the prospects for getting a reform bill passed in the Senate.

“I urge everyone to watch this process closely, for it will be a test of our capacity as a nation to deal with complex and consequential problems. When you see amendments designed to weaken the basic protections of reform; when you see amendments to exempt certain types of financial firms or financial instruments from rules; ask why we should be protecting those private interests at the expense of the public interest.”

Who was this wise man uttering such

By ANDREW LEONARD ow that healthcare is done, what’s next? The most obvious suspect: financial reform. Mark Ambinder of TheAtlantic.com says getting a bill passed should be an “easy political victory.” The New York Times suggests that Republicans are willing to cut a deal. And in a surprise move, on March 22 the Senate Banking Committee voted, on a strictly partisan 1310 vote, to pass the bill out of committee and send it straight to the Senate floor. In a statement, President Obama applauded the move, declaring that “we are one step closer to passing real financial reform.”

So we’re moving right along?

Not quite. There’s been plenty of inside-baseball speculation as to whether the GOP decision to let the bill pass out of committee without proposing any amendments is a sign of internal dissension, or just recognition that nothing was going to get past the committee’s Democratic majority, so why bother. But that’s not material to the larger issue. To get to 60 votes in the Senate, at least one Republican will have to vote for the bill, and there are only two scenarios under which that can hap-

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22 — THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column. Amy Goodman hosts Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. Her fourth book, Breaking the Sound Barrier, was released in paperback (2009).

Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country. His most recent book is 77 Love Sonnets, published

by Common Good Books. Email oldscout@prairiehome.us or see prairiehome.publicradio.org.

sage counsel? None other than Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who ventured into the belly of the anti-regulation beast, the American Enterprise Institute, on March 22, and gave what was undoubtedly his fiercest speech ever on the topic of financial regulation.

Even one of the Geithner’s most relentless critics, Simon Johnson, acknowledged that it was a “good” speech with lots of “good lines.” Of course Johnson then went on to note that Geithner’s recommendation for a resolution authority to deal with the “too big to fail” problem was toothless, and observed that he made no reference at all to the so-called Volcker rule designed to prevent regulating banks from making risky bets with taxpayer-insured money. Sure — even a fierce Geithner does not necessarily put the fear of god into Wall Street.

But whatever — as in every piece of legislation that the Obama administration is fighting to get through Congress, the question is not “how perfect can we make this bill,” but instead, “how much can we prevent this bill from being sabotaged by obstructionists?” And in that sense, Geithner’s speech, coming the same day the Dodd bill was bumped up to the Senate floor, may be politically significant.

The moment is ripe for the Obama administration, and the platform is perfect.

If the administration can frame Republican resistance to a tough financial reform bill as a continuation of the same obstrucContinued on next page

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DONALD KAUL They think that it is the duty of the minority to make sure that absolutely nothing happens while they’re out of power.

Recipe for Fighting the Party of No imagine President Obama is kicking himself for not working harder in the 2008 election so that his party could have won majorities in both houses of Congress.

If he had, the Democrats would control both the House and Senate, and he could have made good on all his campaign promises: health care reform, bank regulation, global warming initiatives, and the rest.

He could have just called up his troops

I

Dispatches ...

Continued from page 5 NEW PUSH FOR PUBLIC OPTION. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she plans to sponsor a bill to add the government-run public option to the national healthcare exchange established by the reform bill, Michael O’Brien reported at TheHill.com (3/22). The public option had been a part of the bill first approved by the House last November, but Senate Democratic leaders were forced to abandon the provision after it became clear that they couldn’t get all 60 Democrats (at the time) to sign onto legislation containing that provision.

Woolsey and her caucus co-chairman, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), had pushed for the public option throughout the different stages of the health debate, but still ended up voting in favor of the legislation in the end, despite some threats to do otherwise earlier in the process.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) has introduced HR 4789, which would let any American buy into Medicare at cost. It quickly attracted 80 co-sponsors (including Woolsey).

Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), has spoken of revisiting the public option down the line and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has committed to holding a vote on a public option in the coming months. Sam Stein re-

Leonard ...

Continued from preceding page tionism that the GOP demonstrated during healthcare reform, Sens. Shelby et al. are going to find themselves in a tight spot.

The country is still furious at Wall Street.

Wall Street’s lobbyists, as Geithner noted in his speech, are spending a million dollars a day to influence reform legislation.

Geithner just asked “everyone” to watch the process. We’ll do our part, but it is critical that the administration take the lead. Obama made a good case for healthcare when he got out of the White House and started taking his message to the people. Now it’s time to put financial reform front and center. If Sen. Shelby proposes a bogus amendment, the White House needs to call it out — and then, do more than just “ask” why special interests are being protected.

Andrew Leonard is a writer who writes the column “How the World Works” at Salon.com, where this originally appeared.

on the Hill and gotten things done, like George W. Bush did in 2001. Of course, Bush got 48% of the vote and Obama only got … what was it? Just 53%.

Wait a minute, that can’t be right. Didn’t Bush claim a mandate as he sent the nation sailing off into two wars, while he and his Congress evaporated a budget surplus and ran up a deficit of a trillion dollars?

How come he could do all of that and Obama, who actually won his election without help from the Supreme Court, can’t get a parking ticket fixed in Washington? Why hasn’t he been able to give us what he promised in 2008?

There is but one answer to that question: Republicans.

The Republicans have this rather bizarre notion about the position of the minority party in our government. They think that it is the duty of the minority to make sure that absolutely nothing happens while they’re out of power. That way, they figure, people will eventually get tired of nothing happening and vote them back into power.

I told you it was bizarre, but it seems to be working.

They have opposed virtually everything that Obama has suggested during his first year in office and they have done it unanimously. It has been decades since

this country has produced a major political party in which not a single elected official has a mind of his or her own.

Russia? Yes. China? Of course. But the United States? You’ve gotta be kidding me.

We’re the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. You could look it up. We don’t march in lock step.

You’d think that the alert American people would take a party like that and throw them out into the middle of the street where they could get run over by a garbage truck.

But no, those free, brave people seem to be listening to the siren song of “No.” They’re losing faith in Obama. He’s falling in the polls. Fire-breathing right-wing candidates around the country are making headway.

They elected a flat-Earth Republican to fill Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts in January. A while later a Republican candidate for governor in Texas was asked whether she thought the government had a role in planning the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. She said the matter needed further investigation.

And she was the candidate rising in the polls.

OK, I know. It’s Texas. If it weren’t for weirdo politics, Texas wouldn’t have any politics at all. But still, it’s frightening to see that kind of irrationality beginning to take

ported at HuffingtonPost.com that public option advocates hope to attach the provision to another bill that could go through the budget reconciliation process, which would allow it to avoid a Republican filibuster and allow it to pass on an up-ordown vote.

people who are poor,” the letter said. “We see the toll on families who have delayed seeking care due to a lack of health insurance coverage or lack of funds with which to pay high deductibles and co-pays. We have counseled and prayed with men, women and children who have been denied health care coverage by insurance companies.” The women religious said they joined with the Catholic Health Association, “which represents 1,200 Catholic sponsors, systems, facilities and related organizations, in saying: The time is now for health reform and the Senate bill is a good way forward.”

Sr. Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity who is president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, praised the legislation, saying it “represents great progress in the long effort to make health care available and affordable to everyone in the United States.” She urged the Senate to take quick action to pass the reconciliation package.

GALLUP: AMERICANS VIEW HEALTH REFORM FAVORABLY. In the first poll taken since the House enacted the health insurance reform, Gallup reported (3/23) that 49% said it was a good thing, 40% said it was a bad thing and 11% don’t know. Independents narrowly said passage was a good thing, by a statistically insignificant 46-45. USA Today reported that a plurality of 48% called the bill “a good first step,” that should be followed by more action on health care. Greg Sargent at The Plum Line noted, “Gallup concludes that passage was a ‘clear political victory,’ but adds that much will turn on which way independents swing in coming weeks.”

CHAMBER WON’T SPEND ON REPEAL PUSH. Republicans in Congress plan to campaign on repealing the health insurance reform legislation and conservative groups are passing petitions to repeal the bill, but it seems the US Chamber of Commerce isn’t interested in throwing good money after bad. The Chamber spent $144 mln on defeating the measure, and CEO Tom Donohue still thinks it was “a wrong and unfortunate decision that ignores the will of the American people,” but he said the business group will push for changes to the bill when it enters the regulatory stage, the Wall Street Journal reported (3/22).

NUNS: HEALTH REFORM IS ‘LIFE AFFIRMING.’ The health reform bill exposed faultlines in the Catholic Church as leaders of more than four dozen US congregations of women religious backed the health reform bill in contradiction of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who claimed the bill did not adequately ban federal funding of abortions. “Despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions,” the nuns said in a letter delivered to members of Congress 3/17, reported by National Catholic Reporter (3/18). “It will uphold long-standing conscience protections and it will make historic new investments — $250 mln — in support of pregnant women.” Signers of the letter include the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the superiors or leadership teams of religious orders representing 59,000 Catholic women religious.

“We have witnessed firsthand the impact of our national health care crisis, particularly its impact on women, children and

GOP FRIVOLOUS LAWSUIT. How likely are the Republican state attorneys general to win their lawsuit claiming that Congress lacks the authority to require people to buy private insurance? Very unlikely. Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli announced plans to sue on the grounds that the federal government was abusing its “power to regulate interstate commerce” by passing a personal mandate. Florida Atty. Gen. Bill McCollum agreed, calling the mandate an attempt “to fine or tax someone just for living.” A lot of people feel the same way about the income tax. But the individual mandate was first proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and it was passed into law by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and advocated by Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Also, the penalties for not buying insurance are basically taxes, over which the courts have given Congress wide latitude. But if the Republican majority on the Supreme Court bought the argument and invalidated the individual mandate, it would not bring down the whole bill — only require insurance companies to insure all comers without forcing the healthy people onto their ratebase. The insurance companies would scream bloody murder.

BUM’S RUSH. When Rush Limbaugh flippantly said that if the healthcare reform bill passes “and all this stuff gets implemented, I am leaving this country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.” But after the House enacted the bill and Limbaugh issued no “Hasta la vista,” two enterprising “dudes living in Brooklyn” named Mike and Patrick (who don’t have health insurance) decided to help move things along. They created ATicketForRush.com, where visitors can contribute — one dollar at a time

hold.

I think it’s time for Obama to abandon his futile efforts at bipartisanship and face reality. The Republicans don’t want bipartisan solutions to anything. If they can’t have things their way (tax cuts for the rich and corporate, being their way) they’ll continue to throw sand in the gears of government and bank on the American people blaming Obama for the resulting stasis.

I think the president should slim down his agenda to two things: health care and jobs. He should craft an explanation of his health-care plan that is no more than three sentences, perhaps four.

I don’t care if it’s a complex plan. Simplify. And if that doesn’t do it, oversimplify.

Then do the same thing with a jobs bill.

Sell them to the American people. If you sell the American people, Congress will follow.

And if it doesn’t, that garbage truck comes along after every election, trolling for losers.

Donald Kaul is a retired two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent for the Des Moines Register who, by his own account, is right more than he’s wrong. He now lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. Email donaldkaul2@verizon.net. Distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.

— toward the cost of a first-class, one-way ticket to Juan Santamaria International Airport. In 24 hours they had raised $1,654. If Rush gets cold feet and refuses to move to Costa Rica, they said, the money will go to Planned Parenthood.

See more Dispatches at www.populist.com.

POET/ Michael Silverstein

Make Tim Geithner Go im Geithner has weakened, delayed, or outright killed any proposal that would undermine the interests of Wall Street investment banks.

Any relationship between his actions as Secretary of the Treasury and the wellbeing of Main Street Americans appears incidental or accidental. It’s really time for this man to be ushered from the scene ...

T

Make Tim Geithner Go (Sung to the tune of “Let My People go”) With Geithner heading Treasury, Make Tim Geithner go; We’re drowning in his policies, Make Tim Geithner go; Tell him, cash in, Collect, his big bank chits; Take Larry Summers, too, And make Tim Geithner go.

The markets shaped by Geithner’s hands, Make Tim Geithner go; For Goldman Sachs he takes his stands, Make Tim Geithner go; Tell him, go ’way, His welcome, here, is now long past, Bring in, old Tall Paul; And make Tim Geithner go.

He killed the Wall Street bonus tax, Make Tim Geithner go; He won’t control those swap deal quacks, Make Tim Geithner go; Go ’way, we say, He don’t, protect, the likes of us; His boss, best wake up soon, And make Tim Geithner go.

Michael Silverstein, formerly senior editor with Bloomberg Financial News and its Markets magazine, is now an investigative poet whose books of satirical poetry include Songs Of Wall Street, Beltway Follies and Street Verse. See www.wallstreetpoet.com.

THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, APRIL 15, 2010 — 23

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