NObamamania for Me

OK, I will admit it up front, I was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama in the election campaign of 2008. I found this well-educated and articulate young man to be what our country needed most after the God, Greed, and Goober years of George W. Bush. Further, it seemed to me that we were in desperate need of a post- Baby Boomer voice in the White House. Someone who could speak to us beyond the harsh rhetoric and polarizing politics of those of us marked by Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society and Watergate. Granted, Barack Obama is well versed in those agendas, but he is not of those agendas, and I held out the hope that he could move ahead on the issues most important to me, without alienating those who held other perspectives.

You see, as much as I revile the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, fundamentalist groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the talking pin heads of Fox News, and all the others I like to label as flat-earthers, I must admit I, am partially to blame for their very existence. As a "card carrying" member of the liberal left, I and my fellow-travellers (as we were labeled by the McCarthyites of the 1950s) scared the beejesus out of our moderately conservative neighbors, until they found refuge in the Reagan Revolution and the Moral Majority. And it wasn't long before the right wing demagogues began to really cash in on the fears of their growing congregations, by constantly feeding the fires of intolerance.

For almost forty years, we on the left have watched most of our most cherished reform ideas and programs suffer tremendously at the hands of those who claimed to be the true bastions of the American way. We saw greed and unbridled capitalism turned loose as government regulation was labeled "socialist." We watched a president take us to war, claiming he was doing God's work in a new "crusade" against evil. We even had to gag down the bitter pill of the word "liberal"being transformed into an expletive by Opiate besotted clowns on right wing talk radio. It got so bad that some of our most revered liberal leaders began referring to themselves as "progressive," in order to avoid the tag of the hated "L" word.

But then came that previously mentioned "crusade" against evil and the invasion of Iraq. Four years later, there were no weapons of mass destruction, no link to Al Qaeda, and thousands of dead young American soldiers. Then, as if on a Biblical cue, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, and we all got a front row TV seat to just how badly the faith-based White House could mismanage a real national disaster. Thus, the door was opened for the Democrats to take control of every elective body in our national government. Enter Barrack Obama and exit the Bush crowd.

So what did we get? For the first three months, the Obama administration spent almost all of its time trying to resuscitate the nation's economy. After years of Republican, and Democratic, I am sorry to say, deregulation and poor oversight, the Wall Street Bankers and hedge fund managers almost destroyed the world's financial systems. Since the 1980s, greed was the order of the day, and avarice lobbied Washington to look the other way. In the last days of the Bush administration, even die-hard Republican capitalists knew that only through a massive federal bail-out, could our economy keep from completely melting down. Thus, between Henry Paulson, Ben Vernanke at the Fed, and the incoming Obama intelligentsia, the TARP program plus a Trillion dollar stimulus package were rushed through Congress and economic armageddon was narrowly avoided, or so the story goes.

But along the way a very disturbing trend began to develop in the Obama White House. Promoting himself in the last days of the 2008 campaign as the post-partisan candidate, President Obama decided to try and make this promise a reality (unlike many other promises he has quietly shelved since January 20). Instead of hammering out real financial reforms, which would of course get no Republican support, the president softened if not outright eliminated many of his core promises. Take for example his demand for strict regulations on executive compensation. . . gone. Or how about the demand that banks are going to be required to restructure all those sub prime loans that caused the economic crisis in the first place? Gone.

OK, I hear the argument bubbling up from all the political realists out there and it goes something like this. . . there is a big difference between governing and campaigning. Oh really, then why were Republicans able to jam all their right wing agendas through Congress during the Bush years? The answer is simple. George W was committed more to his agenda than he was to building consensus. His born-again political commandos did not give a damn about soothing the feathers of any Democrats, since his party controlled both the House and the Senate. And as much as it pains me to say this, the "Dubya" crowd was much more politically savvy about how Washington works than the Obamanistas are. Plus, they reveled, rather than shrank when the opposition cried foul.

Barrack Obama, seems to be more concerned with being seen as a great healer and conciliator, rather than a hardcore political operative. It seems that everything is on the table with his luke-warm legislative agenda. Just look at his health care reform program? Why in the hell should any truly progressive politician give a damn about insurance companies losing money? Where did the single-payer option go that he called for when running for a seat in the Senate in 2004? And why do lobbyists, you remember Obama's sworn enemies, get a seat at the table?

I believe there are two answers here. First, Barrack Obama spent so little time in the Senate that he is woefully under prepared to play the kind of legislative hardball necessary to ram a bill through to final passage. Would that he would have read some of Doris Kearns Goodwin's other books, beyond the Abe Lincoln love fest of Team of Rivals. Mr. President, may I recommend, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 1976? In it Kearns Goodwin writes about how LBJ spent thirty plus years as a United States Senator and knew all there was to know about the legislative process before he became president. After the election of 1960, President Kennedy's entire domestic package was stalled in Congress until his death in 1963. Once in office, the wheeler dealer Johnson successfully pushed through all of Kennedy's bills but added a number of his own, collectively labeled the Great Society. Kennedy had no hope of breaking the solid segregationist Democratic South with any kind of civil rights legislation. Lyndon Johnson broke the back of that impregnable body and the country got the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, The Voting Rights Bill of 1965, and the War on Poverty. Anyone care to give up their Medicare rights?

Johnson, unlike President Obama and the semi-fictitious Lincoln in Kearns Goodwin's latest work, did not give a damn about consensus or camaraderie. But more importantly, Lyndon Johnson paid his dues in Congress and had earned many IOUs from the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill. Obama never paid any dues, and seems almost helpless in getting the Democrats in the House or Senate to play ball. Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden warned the American people about this back during the Democratic primaries, but when they fell by the way, no one paid much attention to the realities of governing. We were all too caught up in Obamamania.

Secondly, and to this writer, much more importantly, President Obama is basking in his own cult phenomenon. Like John Kennedy before him, Obama is enjoying an incredible level of personal appeal. His popularity numbers are hovering around seventy percent, which if true, would make him the most popular president ever. . . at least for now. But personal popularity among the masses does not translate automatically into political capital in Washington. Unless he is able, and more importantly, willing to use the bully pulpit on Capitol Hill, he will never see his legislative agenda get passed. If, on the other hand, he is more worried about being liked than effectively governing, then he is doing just fine.

One possibility that might work for President Obama, one that JFK absolutely refused to employ, would be to let his Vice President run with his legislative agenda. Joe Biden, like Lyndon Johnson, made his political bones in the US Senate and he knows how to get things done. It seems that President Obama has a much better relationship with Biden than Kennedy ever did with Johnson, and Biden has nothing to lose by bending a few well-placed arms, or as Johnson called it, "pressing the flesh." It does not seem that Barrack Obama is at all interested in moving out of his pop culture role, so few other choices remain. Even though he claims that Lincoln is his presidential role model, President Obama runs the risk of being another James Monroe; well liked, elected twice, but very little in the way of a presidential legacy. And don't give me any of the that nonsense about the Monroe Doctrine. That little gem was the policy brainchild of Monroe's curmudgeonly Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams.

Albert Schweitzer v Adam Smith

As the great battle for health care reform is now being waged in Washington, I have been thinking of the very nature of American politics. While the House of Representatives is finalizing its initial proposal for a new system, the defenders of the status quo are marshaling their awesome forces to do battle. If one distills out all the particulars of the reform package, the essence of the proposed bill is nothing more than a redistribution of some resources, rather than truly fundamental change.

Currently, adequate health care in America is enjoyed by people who fall into one of three categories. In the first, are those who make enough money to afford a private health care insurance plan. Most of the cost of these private plans is paid for jointly by individual families and employers. In the second category are those who belong to a government sponsored health care system, like Medicare. here the costs are absorbed mostly by working taxpayers. And the and smallest group, the really lucky people, are those who have accumulated so much wealth that they can afford the very best health care money can buy, whether they are insured or not. Unfortunately, not all Americans fall neatly into these three categories. Presently there are forty-seven million Americans who have no health care coverage at all and are completely at the mercy of the largess of the rest of us.

But this is not another essay on health care reform alone, but rather on the nature of our policy-making processes. For if it were primarily about health care, there is already a simple and cost neutral way to create a just plan for all of us. If the American people demanded that quality health care for all was a national right, rather than a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace, we could restructure the entire system. For once something achieves the status of being a fundamental right, it enters the domain of the common good. Imagine if health care was a cradle to grave right for all Americans, as it is in so many other societies. And imagine further, the savings we would all incur if the profiteering was eliminated. If health care were included in the public safety net we demand from our government, like fire and police protection, the costs would be more than manageable.

Our current system, you see, is based almost completely on a capitalist business model, rather than on a humanitarian one. Health care, like all our other scarce resources is bought and sold in the market place, which creates incredible financial wealth for those who control its distribution. Look at the people and institutions lining up to defeat any substantial reform measures right now: private health insurance companies, private hospital corporations, the American Medical Association, and private drug manufacturers. And what is the one thing that all these groups have in common? Their members and shareholders have gotten wealthy within the current system. Each of these institutions, including a great many physicians in private practice, is engaged in commerce before they are engaged in health care.

The large corporations in this arena have one goal and one goal only in the delivery of health care, and that is to increase share-holder value. The bonuses that are paid out to top management in insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital corporations, are not earned by expanding the level of care they provide, but rather for generating huge profits while increasing per share value. Quality health care, when and if it is delivered, is a by product of a hugely successful business model, rather than a primary mandate. But what if the "for profit" element was legislated away? In other words, what if the Wall Street bankers and fund managers could no longer call the shots? Better yet, why not establish health care as a public utility? How about elected boards determining doctors' fees, drug costs, hospital expenses? No need for insurance companies at all, if we institute a universal care system that kicks in at birth. Where is it written that our current model, or a facsimile thereof is the only way to go?

Back in the summer of 1787, the authors of the United States Constitution, built into that wonderful document a process for making changes as times and circumstances changed for the American people. These Founding Fathers were so wise, that when they wrote Article V, they actually incorporated a way for us, the residents of the states, to make necessary changes, without having to wait for our national government to take the needed steps. The language is actually pretty clear, ". . . or,on application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments." Wouldn't it be something if we actually acted like the patriots we claim to admire so much, and used our political process to bring about fundamental change in an area that profoundly affects us all? I don't know about you, but I would find that kind of citizenship infinitely more rewarding than slapping magnetic stickers on the back of my car.

But that may be too much to ask for, after all we are way too stubborn to finally be getting around to a health care system the French and Canadians have had for more than half a century. Who among God's chosen people would want to admit that somebody else, especially the French, had a better idea than we Americans? Well. . . I would, for one.

Kim Jung Ill Advised

Like many of you, I have been mystified and awed by the reckless behavior of the North Koreans over the past few weeks. What are these people thinking? Now, even The Peoples Republic of China, the number one benefactor of Kim's wacky regime, is openly rebuking this oppressive state. Well, the simple answer to my question is, no one really knows. Perhaps the visibly ailing Kim Jung Ill is in an internal power struggle at home and he is reasserting his domestic political power. Perhaps, the leader of this chronically paranoid police state actually believes he is about to be attacked by untold enemies. Or maybe, just maybe, this is the very predictable response of a wanna-be nation-state lacking true sovereignty.

Over the years I have become convinced that the real threats to international peace and stability lie not in the ramblings and impulses of puffed up autocrats, but instead in the very nature of true national sovereignty. If you will indulge me, let me try to make my case.

The United Nations recognizes 192 nations as member states, and deals with a handful of others, like North Korea, as rogue states. But I would argue that many of the entities labeled "sovereign" by the UN, are anything but nations and are instead the breeding ground for much of the turmoil in the world.

First, a truly sovereign state must occupy a specific piece of geography. By that I mean that the boundaries of a state must be recognized and respected by other states. As of yet, Palestine has not qualified under this first criteria to be a nation, as no one can agree to a common set of geographical boundaries, not even the Palestinians themselves. Until real borders can be established, Palestine will remain more of an abstract idea, rather than a physical reality, and thus a hotbed for turmoil.

Secondly, and much more important than merely establishing international borders, is that these boundaries must be defendable from outside invasion. The history of the world is replete with stories of one nation making war on and conquering another. But the truly sovereign states make such imperialistic actions by an outside aggressor incredibly risky. Many of the so-called nation states recognized by the UN as sovereign, are completely incapable of defending themselves from their acquisitive neighbors. The Republic of Georgia for example has been undergoing one geo-revision after another over the past decade by the military incursions of the Russians. And it has only been because other truly sovereign nations have stepped in that Georgia exists at all. Consider the Korean peninsula again. The boundary between North and South has never been definitively established, creating a great deal of instability in East Asia.

Third, and this may in fact be the most important element of guaranteeing defendable borders, is population. You know, people who identify with the nation-state. Every truly sovereign state has enough people to actually get out there and fight if their borders are in jeopardy. Granted, not every sovereign state can always guarantee its security, but the sovereign state can put up such a fight that it makes invasion by an outside aggressor a very risky proposition. The question is, how many people are needed? The simple answer is. . . enough to deter aggression. Enough to make an expansion-minded neighbor really think twice before launching a war of conquest. Both Kuwait and Georgia fell short in this area and were easily overwhelmed by large aggressive neighbors, Iraq and Russia respectively. On the other hand, Vietnam and Afghanistan, barely out of the stone age, had enough people and were able to put up ferocious defenses against major first world powers to render conquest far too costly for even the greatest of super powers.

But human numbers alone are not enough to guarantee lasting sovereignty. For the glue that holds a nation's people together is the voluntary incorporation of a common culture. With all due respect to the Ronald Reaganophiles out there, the real death blow to the Soviet Union was not American resolve, but rather the lack of a unifying identity. While Lenin, Stalin, and the rest of those geriatric Russian bureaucrats were consolidating the Soviet empire of the early 20th century, they paid no attention to the cultural traps they were setting for themselves. Under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, there were dozens of ethnic nationalities with their own unique cultural patterns. Perhaps believing their own sloganeering of "workers of the world unite," The Soviet communists failed to realize that Latvians, Armenians, Uzbeckis, Turkestanis, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Chechens had no idea what they were talking about. After the better part of a century, the Soviet Union was so financially exhausted trying to create a Soviet culture in a geographic expanse where over fifty different languages were spoken, they just gave up. One can only wonder what might have happened if the Bolsheviks had limited their revolution to Czarist Russia. A "Soviet" Russian Union would have been a more formidable rival on the world stage than the bloated entity that emerged after World War One.

We are now down to the final two elements necessary for the long-term establishment of national sovereignty. And it is in these last areas where North Korea most miserably fails as a truly sovereign state. The first of these is the creation of a viable national economy. For true sovereignty to exist, a nation must have and economic system that does two things reasonably well. First, it must be able to create and maintain an expanding national prosperity. Whatever system a nation devises or adopts to distribute wealth: capitalism, socialism, mixed-market, or command economy, it must actually have some wealth to distribute. No matter how strong the culture, if one's nation state is not blessed with critical natural resources and the technological skills to exploit them, true sovereignty will never be achieved. Further, those resources and technical skills need to be diverse as well as abundant. Anyone care to take bets on how long Saudi Arabia lasts as a nation-state when the last drop of crude is pumped out of the Persian Gulf?

But there is another element to a viable economy, beyond technical skills and abundant resources. In order for a nation state to remain, or even become sovereign, its people must perceive of its economy as being fair. Not since Eden, has any human community provided infinite resources to its inhabitants. So the primary task of a stable national economy is not to provide everyone with all that they desire, but rather to instill in them a belief that the manner in which goods and services are distributed is fundamentally just. The most violent revolutionary movements in history: the French, Russian, and Chinese began in countries with abundant resources that were criminally mismanaged. National wealth alone is not enough to guarantee lasting sovereignty, it must be accompanied by an allocation system deemed fair by its citizenry.

The final element found in every truly sovereign country is the establishment of a legitimate national government. By legitimate I do not refer to the type of government employed, but rather whether the citizens of a given nation state believe that their particular political system is just. Simply put, if a government spends more of its resources aiming guns inward at its own citizens, than outward, in protection of its borders, it is not legitimate! In a truly sovereign state, the citizens obey the laws because they believe it is right to do so. Whenever a government has to use coercion to achieve compliance, sovereignty is at best an illusion. Remember Sadam Hussein? His Iraq, like Kim's North Korea, was a repressive police state, always one coup attempt away from a complete meltdown.

So what does all this mean? Using this somewhat simplistic method of determining actual sovereignty, one can see that there are not all that many truly sovereign states on planet Earth. And a lack of true sovereignty makes most political entities quite dangerous. For instance, looking at North Korea, we see a country with defendable borders alright, and a huge army to make sure the borders remain intact. But without any kind of a sustainable and viable economy, and with perhaps the most repressive government anywhere, it is only a matter of time before this dangerous pseudo-nation begins to come apart.

For the truly sovereign states along the Pacific Rim there are only two viable choices: hasten the demise of the North Korean regime, or find ways to move the "Dear Leader" (as Kim demands to be called) toward legitimacy. The former choice would most assuredly mean engaging a lunatic with nuclear arms in open combat, while that latter will take a level of diplomacy light years beyond anything attempted so far. My advice is for the entrepreneurial spirited among my readers is to go into the bomb shelter business in Tokyo and Seoul.

Unhealthy America

Perhaps because I am 61 years old and can't do most of the things I used to do, I spent some time browsing through the Obama political record and came across something interesting. When he was running for a seat in the Senate in 2004, the President gave a policy speech on health care in American and said quite strongly, that the only way we can permanently fix our health care problems and insure that all Americans have adequate coverage, is to adopt a European style single-payer insurance system. You know, like we already have if you are over 65, in the military, a veteran, or best yet, a member of the United States Congress.

Then, just a few weeks ago, when now President Obama introduced his proposals for the big health car fix, he called for some kind of a multi-tiered, private/public payment system that still won't cover every man, woman, and child in the US. So what happened? Did the young naive State Senator from Illinois finally come to his senses and abandon his initial idea? Or might their be the faint whiff of a big sewer rat, drifting off the president's modified stance on health in America?

To answer these questions, we need to look back to the failed Clinton health care bill of 1994. Back then, the team of Billary introduced sweeping reforms for a program not yet terminal, as is our system today. Central to their program, as called for by Senate candidate Obama in 2004, was a single-payer system to insure all Americans. The Clinton White House knew that the big health insurance companies wanted nothing to do with any kind of universal health coverage, as that would mean that they would actually have to offer protection to people who were really sick! So they moved away from the private, for profit sector, and proposed a Medicare-like system that would cover everyone, thus spreading the payout liabilities in an equitable manner.

Well it did not take long for the big insurance companies, drug manufacturers, and the AMA to muster their forces and call an all out frontal attack on the bill. Perhaps you remember the now infamous TV spots with Harry and Louise agonizing over the possibility of a government run health care system. More importantly, the private health care industry created a number of highly effective lobbying groups and began pouring massive amounts of money into the campaign coffers of every member of the US Congress, Democrat and Republican. And like magic Senators and Representatives discovered that there wasn't actually all that much wrong with the way we deliver health care in this country. Further, they touted the fact that all the major corporate players promised to severely cut costs on their own in a voluntary effort.

Well all I can say is that I hope that Harry and Louise won the lottery, as most of us have seen our health care costs skyrocket over the last fifteen years, while the quality of the services delivered has continued to erode. Isn't it wonderful to know that while you live in the richest country on the face of the earth, you also live in the only developed country where health coverage is not a right. In fact, you live in the only country where it is possible to go bankrupt due to medical expenses. Meanwhile, all those people who swore an oath to represent you and me, spend two out of every five working days fundraising for their next election campaigns. And the big health care players like Blue Shield, Merck, the American Hospital Association, and the AMA keep on writing those checks.

Come on, do you really believe that all these fat cats are going to support real change in our health care system? By the way, if you care to look, you will find that after 2004, Barrack Obama has taken more campaign money from the health care industry than any other elected official in Washington. After all, it costs upward of a billion dollars to be elected president these days, and there are only so many five dollar Internet donations out there.