politics

From some focus groups:

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. In our conversations, it was striking how these voters constantly characterized themselves as part of a group of individuals who share a set of beliefs, a unique knowledge, and a commitment of opposition to Obama that sets them apart from the majority of the country.

There's some parallel trends to how I felt in 2003, save the "secret agenda" part. The Bush agenda was more or less announced, and I never really thought they'd suspend elections or any of the rest. Just fuck it all up and walk away rich.

Anyway, peering into the mind of the Other is a little disturbing. Reminds me of this Philip K Dick short story about a hospital ship of paranoids that crash lands on some other world. They're convinced they're constantly under attack, and develop a whole society based on the notion. But there's nothing out there.

It's taken the threat of total failure, but the Left is getting back in action on this issue. There's a legislative strategy you can help with (I faxed Ron Wyden in Oregon, who should be pushing this thing for crissakes) and there appears to be latent public support out there. Time to push.

So, Johnny on the spot, here's linguist and cognitive psychologist George Lakoff with the some language tips:

The narrative is simple:

Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.

The insurance companies are doing their worst, spreading lies in an attempt to maintain their profits and keep Americans from getting the care they so desperately need. You, our citizens, must be the heroes. Stand up, and speak up, for an American plan.

Language

As for language, the term “public option” is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that’s what it really is.

The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It’s got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, “I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I’m fight for it here.” Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

A Health Care Emergency. Americans are suffering and dying because of the failure of insurance company health care. 50 million have no insurance at all, and millions of those who do are denied necessary care or lose their insurance. We can’t wait any longer. It’s an emergency. We have to act now to end the suffering and death.

Doctor-Patient care. This is what the public plan is really about. Call it that. You have said it, buried in PolicySpeak. Use the slogan. Repeat it. Have every spokesperson repeat it.

Coverage is not care. You think you’re insured. You very well may not be, because insurance companies make money by denying you care.

Deny you care… Use the words. That’s what all the paperwork and administrative costs of insurance companies are about – denying you care if they can.

Insurance company profit-based plans. The bottom line is the bottom line for insurance companies. Say it.

Private Taxation. Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20% - 30% of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96% of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can’t vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation.

Is it time for progressive tea parties at insurance company offices?

Doctors care; insurance companies don’t. A public plan aims to put care back into the hands of doctors.

Insurance company bureaucrats.  Obama mentions them, but there is no consistent uproar about them. The term needs to come into common parlance.

Insurance companies ration care. Say it and ask the right questions: Have you ever had to wait more than a week for an authorization? Have you ever had an authorization turned down? Have you had to wait months to see a specialist? Does you primary care physician have to rush you through? Have your out-of-pocket costs gone up? Ask these questions. You know the answers. It’s because insurance companies have been rationing care. Say it.

Insurance companies are inefficient and wasteful. A large chunk of your health care dollar is not going for health care when you buy from insurance companies.

Insurance companies govern your lives. They have more power over you than even governments have. They make life and death decisions. And they are accountable only to profit, not to citizens.

The health care failure is an insurance company failure. Why keep a failing system? Augment it. Give an alternative.

Better news (for those who still get this sort of thing from me) on the health care front. It appears that the Democratic party has realized that the GOP is not going to partner with them in good faith on reforming our effed-up insurance system. They are preparing to move forward anyway.

This was, of course, completely obvious from the outset. A simple tactical analysis shows no upside for the GOP in cooperation. Their base — Limbaugh listeners, "birthers", "deathers", and people who feel it's a good idea to bring an AR-15 to a town hall — will punish them politically for any act that resembles compromise as capitulation to "fascism". Further, the current conservative ideological framework cannot accommodate the possibility that government involvement in anything can make it better — "government is the problem" remains dogma — in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, particularly on the issue of health care, e.g. every other advanced nation on Earth.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a victory here (just as in '92/'93) which "actually improves the lives of Americans" would cement the dominance of Democrats (or at least the irrelevance of Republicans) with the current political generation.

They have literally zero direct/personal incentives to do reform. It might, you know, help people and save lives, but there's nothing in it for Republican politicians themselves, except perhaps in rare cases where they have first-degree friends and family who's asses are on the line. Their incentive as individuals and as a party is to block reform, or failing that to make sure that any new law is as convoluted and byzantine as possible, hopefully costly, and maybe even delivering a lot of free money to large corporations. That way they can argue that "see, it just doesn't work."

So, it's quite good to see that the priority has shifted from "bipartisanship" to "policy that can work." Much credit here goes to a newly-emergent progressive bloc(k) in the House, who provide an important counterweight to the sold-out hack "Blue Dog" caucus. It's great to see the left getting organized enough to play congressional hardball. Action now moves to whipping the Senate.

This could work out. Congress can force an actual GOP filibuster, and potentially even pass a bill with 50 votes in the Senate via the budget reconciliation process. With any luck, as the Fall season/session begins, some sort of coordinated effort will emerge on Capitol Hill to break the logjam.

Paul Krugman, still a fave:

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

There's always hope, and I do still hope that Barack can pull this out, but as I've said before, it seems now like the odds are against meaningful reform.

This passion deficit is a big part of the problem. Anyone who's been paying attention knows the opposition was always going to be passionate. Perhaps we weren't aware of how murderously so, but there are rich veins of anger and frustration they would always tap into.

The problem from the other side is that the Democratic party strategically decided to follow a path of "bipartisanship" which required pre-emptive compromise, watering-down, while simultaneously blocking precisely zero angles for attack. Chuck Grassley, who's supposed to be the point man for GOP cooperation, is openly spreading lies and misinformation about the bill he was supposed to help shephard.

The bottom line is that Republicans don't want this to work. There's no upside in it for them. In the face of overwhelming evidence from around the world, they ideologically cannot accept that government involvement in health care can help control costs and improve outcomes. They also know politically that if this does work their status as a regional rump minority party will be cemented for a generation. Given this, why would they ever support it? Makes no sense.

But Obama and his Congressional allies went into this as a good-faith partnership, so on one side you have "crazy base land" in the trenches and GOP leaders who realize they're in a fight for their party's life. On the other side are Establishment Democrats following a milquetoast line of smarmy technocratic "compromise" and abandoning/shutting-out all allies on the left, possibly due to massive infusions of cash from corporations who financial outlooks are threatened by a reduction in health care costs (aka profits). All this on an issue which is quite literally life or death for hundreds of thousands of people every year.

It will be great if it works out, but the inability of the leadership to comprehend the stakes is disheartening. A strong stance -- single-payer, a willingness to use the majority to ram legislation through -- would have inspired passion on the Left, and given Democrats a position to actually negotiate from if they felt that there was a chance of valuable participation from across the isle.

Instead they crumpled in front of a bunch of sold-out frat boys, wandered away from their friends, agreed to get fucked, swallowed their political Rohypnol, and are now reduced to weakly pleading for lube and protection, hoping they survive the night.

It's sad, but it doesn't inspire passionate advocacy.

I find it hard to get very excited about the Health Care Reform plan currently on a herky-jerky trip through Congress. It’s watered-down to the point of being thoroughly unexciting, and the political theater around it has been about as pleasant as a Yanni concert.

However it would do a lot of practical good if it can pass without getting wholly gummed up with red-tape and dangly ornimentation. The quickest win is preventing private companies from dumping unhealthy people (who, you know, need the coverage) just when they need help. Longer-term, establishing viable public option — even a small one — will let us begin gradually changing our bass-ackwards incentive structure around medicine.

But I also have to say, it would be good not to lose to high-end corporate think tanks and right-wing reactionary millionares who bus around sadly deluded citizens to shout-down their representatives. Protesting outside a town hall is great, but stopping it isn’t (and wasn’t cool when loopy code-pinkers did it to protest the war either).

Plus, it will make the baby Jesus cry if shutting down civil discourse allows arguments like this to carry the day:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K.,where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,” the editorial claims.

Ummmmm… Oxford is in ye old UK, you sold-out hacks.

I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but I think our Black President and his erstwhile allies in DC are blowin’ it.

His health care initiative is currently getting gang-fucked by a bunch of sweaty, chubby lobbyists and self-congradulatory establishmentarian hacks.

He goes on TV to try and push, but ends up giving a not so zingy lecture, and then tossing off a line at the end about his buddy Henry Louis Gates, Harvard Professor and Black Man, who happened to, you know, get himself arrested the other night for trespassing in his own house by the Cambridge PD.

And so naturally that’s what all the media’s buzzing about.

I don’t think this ends well without some kind of serious shift. The Democratic party is on course to find out just how easy it is to waste a high water mark, because when you blow it on piece of policy that has the best chance of meaningfully improving people’s lives, and then you sail right into the teeth of a protracted recession, you lose.

The arguments against this program are horseshit, and all the watering down ain’t nothing more than greedy misery-humping shitbags trying to protect their slice of the bloodmoney. Sure lack of insurance kills 20,000 people or so a year, and unsustainable cost patterns will mean the whole thing will break down at some point in the midst of the Baby Boomer retirement wave, but there’s money in crisis. That’s business, right? Can’t rush any changes.

What we are witnessing here (and I think we’ll see the same thing on carbon and global warming) is the failure of our political system to effectively alter the status quo in the face of impending catastrophe. We are headed towards the iceberg, and the Titanic will not be turned. Sadly, I think it’s going to be a theme.

Matt Taibbi’s piece on Goldman Sachs is making waves:

Business reporter Leela de Kretser heaps scorn on Matt Taibbi for telling people things that were already common knowledge in the financial press about the Goldman Sachs vampire squid (never going to get tired of that phrase)...

You can also see some Taibbi video and read the whole thing legit now on Rolling Stone’s Website. Give it a gander and gaze upon the guts of our new gilded age.

Plenty of radical types from both ends of the political spectrum subscribe to some form of “it’s got to get worse before it gets better” philosophy. Most of them, however, aren’t nationally televised commentators rooting for Bin Laden:

Yesterday, Glenn Beck guest and former CIA official Michael Scheuer openly hoped for a terrorist attack on the United States, saying, “the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States…It’s an absurd situation again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.” Beck nodded solemnly

For my part, I’d like to bracket any observations about the mobeus-like cognitive dissonance of the reactionary right-wing mind or what this kind of thing says about the modern media landscape, and actually engage the question. Having existed through an actual terrorist attack on the actual city I lived in, I think there’s really something to be said for the positive social effects.

In the six weeks or so after New York City was attacked, prior to the hardening of the National Patriotism and before the appropriation of this tragedy as causus belli became sickeningly apparent, very interesting things happened in my town. In the face of mass death, an ever-present smell of burning plastic, rifle toting solders and the specter of Anthrax spores swirling through the Subway (remember that? never solved it since it turned out not to be a-rabs…), there existed an amazing solidarity among the people.

It wasn’t unity per se; folks were all over the map. I remember seeing posters in and among the photos of the dead calling for volunteers to privately organize and launch a counterattack. Others responded with meditation circles. Non-insane people had heated (shouting) debates in public parks. And yet everyone was kind. Charity flourished, as did simple politeness. There was no crime to speak of, and people more or less looked out for one another.

This all coincided with the dot-com bust, so the economy more or less collapsed, and everyone had time on their hands. As normal patterns were disrupted, new life flourished. Art, love, friendships, community; all these things boomed in the city’s collective recognition of mortality.

I really don’t want to say that I’m glad for all that destruction — the people killed, the people (not in small number) who actually went crazy as a result, etc — but it was certainly a privilege to live through the aftermath. It’s complicated, and I don’t think the rest of Estados Unidos got anywhere near the same experience. The Pentagon is physically isolated from DC, and the reaction there was pretty different from what I hear, more suburban. Duct tape stashes and permanent concrete barricades. The rest of the country was traumatized via television — jingoistic propaganda to follow — but got none of the real effects on their actual lives. No pattern disruption or changes in habits of action. Which is too bad.

To return to the post that sparked my comment, it really seems like this other experience, the televised national trauma, and the chauvinism and fear which resulted outside the actual effected areas is what Beck (and Cheney) and their ilk long for. National Pride. They miss the aenomic sheepie leader-following and empty-headed chest thumping they conjured forth with their remote-control phantasmagoria.

And fuck that noise. Really. Your little psychodrama was a moral and strategic disaster. Please get your poser-jollies somewhere else.

For my part, I do wish we could get that kind of shock to the system, without killing people. Confronting the finite nature of life while taking a collective holiday (and being drawn into conjoint community service) for four weeks is a pretty healthy thing, and could do a lot of good in the country. Might get a bunch of people who do pointless counterproductive shit for a living to retire.

Following up on the Iranian election post, the situation there seems to be evolving. I appreciate that our leadership is staying out of it, etc. I don’t have any amazing insight except to note that in my (western) political experience, having attractive young people rally to your cause tends to help.

There’s a lot of really amazing imagery coming out, and some interesting comics, etc.

Yeah, and like, whoa:

Power crisis in Iran. Revolution? It’s certainly something. Seems for real, with all of the opposition candidates (including conservative former head of Revolutionary Guard) calling Friday’s election stolen. Leading opposition candidate now under house arrest, and state forces clamping down on foreign media, jamming BBC satellites, locking down cellphone networks and internet access. Rumors of tanks, and video of riot police on motorcycles in the streets:

More:

Also, according to eyewitness accounts, gunshots could be heard last night until 3am in Elahiyeh, alongside chants of “God is great!” from people on their rooftops. This was a widespread tactic in the 1979 revolution, in which people were urged to take to their rooftops and shout “Allah-u Akbar.”

On the nerdly front, this is also fascinating. Far moreso than last year’s action in Burma, this is a revolution with an online component. Iran is much harder to seal off information-wise and so word is leaking out anyway. For anyone wondering how Twitter is good for anything, click here and wait for 10 seconds, when it will say something like “16 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” Also good for pressuring old-school media.

Also different from Burma, the powers that be care about their ability to use networks as well, so there are spontanious denial-of-service attacks from the opposition. Goodness knows what will be possible once someone teaches people how to use popular benchmarking tools.

I hope it turns out well for the forces of Liberal Social Democracy, and with a minimum of bloodshed. We’ll see.