Sherry Chandler

It’s time to put an end to this excremental outpouring

Paul Krugman has it right about the passage of the healthcare bill:

This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.

There may have been real reasons to debate or oppose this bill but bullying, name-calling, racism, and blind obstruction should not be tolerated.

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A Ticket for Rush! Thanks to Deb Scott for the link.

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Republicans Face Drawbacks of United Stand on Health Bill

David Frum, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization, said Republicans had tried to defeat the bill to undermine Mr. Obama politically, but in the process had given up a chance of influencing a huge bill. Mr. Frum said his party’s stance sowed doubts with the public about its ideas and leadership credentials, and ultimately failed in a way that expanded Mr. Obama’s power.

“The political imperative crowded out the policy imperative,” Mr. Frum said. “And the Republicans have now lost both.”

“Politically, I get the ‘let’s trip up the other side, make them fail’ strategy,” he said. “But what’s more important, to win extra seats or to shape the most important piece of social legislation since the 1960s? It was a go-for-all-the-marbles approach. Unless they produced an absolute failure for Mr. Obama, there wasn’t going to be any political benefit.”

I say this again — the only aim of the Republicans in this was to obstruct. They were basically holding their collective breath so Mommy would give in. And when that didn’t work, they kicked and screamed and spit. Not a pretty sight.

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Just don’t tell [Rush] about Costa Rica’s successful universal healthcare system.

Paul Krugman

Via By the Fault, this clip from a speech by Dr. Paul Krugman at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco from October 30, 2007 on the subject of income inequality in the United States.

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And then there’s this:

During its weeklong deliberations, Congress made many changes to the Bush administration�s original proposal to bail out the financial industry, but one overarching aspect of the initial plan that remains is the vast discretion it gives to the Treasury secretary.

The draft legislation, which will be put to a House vote on Monday, gives Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and his successor extraordinary power to decide how the $700 billion bailout fund is spent. For example, if he thinks it wise, he may buy not only mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but any other financial instrument.

To be sure, the Treasury secretary�s powers have been tempered since the original Bush administration proposal, which would have given Mr. Paulson nearly unfettered control over the program. There are now two separate oversight panels involved, one composed of legislators and the other including regulatory and administration officials.

Still, Mr. Paulson can choose to buy from any financial institution that does business in the United States, or from pension funds, with wide discretion over what he will buy and how much he will pay. Under most circumstances, banks owned by foreign governments are not eligible for the money, but under some conditions, the secretary can choose to bail out foreign central banks.

Under the bill, the Treasury is to buy the securities at prices he deems appropriate. Mr. Paulson may set prices through auctions but is not required to do so.

Rarely if ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government money as he sees fit, with no rules requiring him to seek out the lowest possible price for assets being purchased.

I am very dubious about this. The Bush administration really likes this idea of the strong man but it doesn’t seem to have worked out all that well for you and me. Also, they don’t have a real good record with no-bid contracts.

Another one of my constant themes: checks and balances. (And I don’t mean blank checks either.)

Why those down-ticket races are so important

Or maybe there’s some hope after all, according to Paul Krugman:

But the vote was bigger than the theatrics. It was the first major health care victory that Democrats have won in a long time. And it was enormously encouraging for advocates of universal health care.

Ostensibly, Wednesday�s vote was about restoring cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. What it was really about, however, was the fight against creeping privatization. Democrats finally took a stand � and, thanks to Senator Kennedy, seem to have prevailed.

The story really begins in 2003, when the Bush administration rammed the Medicare Modernization Act through Congress, literally in the dead of night. That bill established large de facto subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans � plans in which Medicare funds are funneled through private insurance companies, rather than directly paying for care.

Since then, enrollment in these plans has been growing rapidly. This has had a destructive effect on Medicare�s finances: the fastest-growing type of Medicare Advantage plan, private fee-for-service, costs taxpayers 17 percent more per beneficiary than Medicare without the middleman. It also threatens to undermine Medicare�s universality, turning it into a system in which insurance companies cherry-pick healthier and more affluent older Americans, leaving the sicker and poorer behind.

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In previous years, payments to doctors were maintained through bipartisan fudging: politicians from both parties got together to waive the rules. In effect, Congress kept Medicare functioning by expanding the federal budget deficit.

This year, the Democratic leadership decided, instead, to link the �doctor fix� to the fight against privatization and offered a bill that maintains doctors� payments while reining in those expensive private fee-for-service plans.

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Here�s how it will play out, if all goes well: early next year, President Obama will send his health care plan to Congress. The plan will face vociferous opposition from the insurance industry � but the Medicare vote suggests that this time, unlike in 1993, Democrats will hold together.

Unless Democrats win even bigger than expected, however, they won�t have the 60 Senate votes needed to override a filibuster. What the Medicare fight shows is that the Democrats could nonetheless prevail by taking their case to the public, daring their opponents to stand in the way of health care security � so that in the end they get some Republicans to switch sides, and get the legislation through.

A lot can still go wrong with this vision. But the odds of achieving universal health care, soon, look a lot higher than they did just a couple of weeks ago.

Mr. Rich White & Mr. Poor White

A bargain with the devil, from Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream:

Once upon a time, down South, Mr. Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. He studied about it a long time before he made it, for it had to be a bargain Mr. Poor White would want to keep forever. It’s not easy to make a bargain another man will want to keep forever, and Mr. Rich White knew this. So he looked around for something to put in it that Mr. Poor White would never want to take out.

He looked around . . . and his eyes fell on the Negro. I’ve got it, he whispered.

He called in Mr. Poor White and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you and me lately�how hard it is for us to make a living down here with no money and the rest of the country against us. To keep my farm and mill going the way I want them to go, making big profit off of little capital, I have to keep wages low, you can see that. It’s the only way I can make as much as I want to make as quickly as I want to make it. And folks coming in from the North have to keep wages low too, for that’s our southern tradition.

“It’s a good way for us rich folks and it’s not bad you either, for you’re smart enough to see that any job’s better than no job at all. And you know too that whatever’s wrong with the South isn’t my fault or your fault but is bound to be the Yankee’s fault or the fault of those freight rates. . . .

“For instance, the nigger. You don’t need me to tell you that ever since the damyankee freed him the nigger’s been scrouging you, pushing you off your land, out your job, jostling you on the sidewalks, all time biggity. If he hadn’t been freed, he’d never bothered you, I could have kept him on the farm and bossed him like I bossed him for 200 years. But the damyankees always know better, don’t they! Here I am busy at my mill with no time to boss him, and here he is pushing, causing lot of trouble. Thing I can’t forget is your skin’s the color of my skin and we’re both made in God’s image; we’re white men and white men can’t let a nigger push ‘em.

“There’re two jobs down here that need doing: Somebody’s got to tend to the living, and somebody’s go tend to the nigger. Now, I’ve learned a few things at making a living you’re too no-count to learn (else you’d be making money same way I make it): things about jobs and credit, prices, hours, wages, votes, and so on. But one thing you can learn easy, any white man can, is how to handle the black man. Suppose now you over the thing you can do and let me take over the thing I can do. You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money. How about it?”

See also Joshua Zeitz, What Did Martin Luther King Really Believe?

Critically, he envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting both African-Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the �derivative victims� of slavery and Jim Crow. In this regard he leaned on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously observed that poor and working-class whites gained nothing from Jim Crow but the psychological �wages of whiteness.� In return for the psychological boost that �whiteness� gave them, poor whites�millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age�surrendered political and economic power to their elite counterparts. King might well have been thinking of the radical white writer Lillian Smith�s 1943 parable, �Two Men and a Bargain,� in which �Once a time, down South, Mr.

Rich White made a bargain with Mr. Poor White. . . . You boss the nigger, and I�ll boss the money.� According to Smith, they �segregated southern money from Mr. Poor White and they . . . segregated the Negro from everything.�

Smith�s reasoning�and King�s�was well-founded. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It�s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the satisfaction that they weren�t black.

As the 1960s wore on, King came to view social problems more through the lens of class and less through the lens of race.

And also Paul Krugman, Bubba Isn’t Who You Think:

In fact, if you look at voting behavior, low-income whites in the South are not very different from low-income whites in the rest of the country. You can see this both in Larry Bartels�s �What�s the matter with What�s the Matter With Kansas?� (pdf), Figure 3, and in a comprehensive study of red state-blue state differences by Gelman et al (pdf). It�s relatively high-income Southern whites who are very, very Republican. Can I get away with saying that rich white trash are the problem? Probably not.

If I had to hazard a guess, strictly my own opinion, about why we’re seeing what looks like a racial split in the current Democratic primary, I would say that it isn’t so much about racism on the part of the “lunch-bucket” whites but about economics issues. When African Americans look at Barack Obama, they see the first black President of the United States of America and they are rightly very excited about that prospect. When working-class white people look at Hillary Clinton, they see some one who will help them with pocketbook issues, issues that are very important right now.