Rants of Rob

Progressive Politics and Culture

Archive for July, 2009

Steve Schale Endorses Kendrick Meek for US Senate

Jul 28

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Politics | No Comments

Kendrick MeekMr. Schale, the director of Florida for Change, is an immensely influential Democrat whose endorsement of Rep. Meek is an acknowledgment that the Primary race is all but over.

The General election, however, is a different matter altogether. As of the last reporting period, Rep. Meek has raised $2,680,339, while Gov. Christ has raised $4,399,948. Large majorities of both candidates’ funding is from individual contributions, so this is a trend likely to continue.

In a state with four major media markets, money is the most important factor. Unless Congressman Meek can close the fundraising gap, he will lose this race. He’s relied a little more on PAC money than Crist, so that avenue is likely to be dried up for him. He can, however, tap the pockets of national Democrats, thanks to an apparent relationship with Bill Clinton, who appeared at his first fundraiser.

Good luck to the Congressman.

Give to Kendrick here.

Tags: , , , ,

Personal Responsibility

Jul 27

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 6 Comments

rush_limbaughThe election of President Obama has done at least one thing to improve the political climate, and that is to put health care front and center as an issue. That’s fortunate, because we have been ignoring multiple parallel crises in the American care system for decades, and the consequences are becoming deadly serious. We spend more than any other country on health care, and we get less for our money than any industrialized nation.

The first problem is under-participation. The AMA has estimated that more than half of Americans do not have their own Primary Care Physicians.  Add to that, of course, the more than 50 million Americans with no health coverage at all, and you can see that more than 150 million people in this country are not getting regular checkups, do not have the medical care they do receive coordinated by anybody, have no central store for medical records, have no way to manage the risk of pharmaceutical interaction, are not detecting disease early and are not treating it effectively. We can see the consequences when more than ten percent of our health care costs stem from one disease: Diabetes. Since most diabetes is Type 2, the vast majority of these costs are preventable through early risk identification and lifestyle changes. Instead, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to treat people who should never have been sick.

The second problem is the role of profit in the health insurance industry. It’s not simply that thirty percent of our extravagant spending goes to profit and the recision and denial mechanisms necessary to protect it, but the profit motive of employer-based care produces perverse incentives. Care is denied whenever possible. Early intervention is denied to minimize “medical loss,” even though it would reduce future outlays, because insurers do not know if they will cover the patient when they get sicker. They have no incentive to reduce their future costs by eliminating deductibles and co-pays for diagnostic and preventive care. Thus the financial incentives of insurers are perversely related to the health outcomes of their policyholders. Insurers are profitable while Americans become sicker every year.

The third problem has been the least-discussed: the subsidized corn sugars and soy oils that are killing us. The modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes are directly related to the late twentieth-century surge of subsidies into factory farms that produce little but empty calories. Our foods contain steadily diminishing quantities of vitamins, anti-oxidants and amino acids as a giant biochemistry experiment engulfs its third generation. The health consequences of our fast-food culture are so severe that life expectancies are actually beginning to drop.

So, we’re facing a fifty trillion dollar Medicare iceberg at the same time we’re spending tens of billions a year to subsidize the foods that are killing us. But conservatives choose to blame poorly educated working class families with little money and less time for patronizing the businesses these same conservatives spend their time fighting for. The hypocrisy of it would be startling were not hypocrisy the operating standard of the conservative movement. On the one hand, the mounting data linking modern factory food to every form of chronic disease is dismissed as liberal “culture war” against good old-fashioned American food. On the other hand, people who uncritically consume this fare are blamed for the diseases that result. Don’t they know this stuff is bad for you?

All too often, they don’t. Industrial food is huge business in the United States, spending billions of dollars a year to market their products, targeted specifically at younger, poorer people who do not know about the link between the epidemics of diabetes and obesity and the food they are eating. Fast food outlets are located where poorer, less-educated people work, shop and live. Two-income families working three or four part-time jobs with little control over their working hours lack the ability to get together for a home-cooked meal. Even if they could make the time, they find that the fresh fruits and vegetables they need to stay healthy are not subsidized, not as available in their neighborhoods and require a struggle to get small children to eat, a struggle they no longer have the time or energy to undertake. So they get the fried chicken or the Happy Meal and stave off hunger for another day, frequently unaware that these foods are not just vaguely unhealthy but specifically deadly to precisely the kind of poorer, less-educated families the companies that sell them target with their advertisements and store placement.

So, minimum wage workers must show “personal responsibility” but food industry and health insurance executives are allowed, no, required, to cut any corner, tell any lie, spare no expense, walk away from any number of sick and needy people, to make profits that enrich them and their shareholders. If one were to wake up and say to herself “I make money from human misery and basic human decency demands that I stop,” she would be treated as mentally ill and possibly face tort action.

Capitalism is a vital part of modern society and I wouldn’t live in any country without it, but if there are no other values in a society save those of the marketplace, that society is in crisis. We have to stop arguing about the obvious and we have to stop treating corporate interests as if they were inviolate. Our physical and economic futures depend on it. Let’s put single-payer back on the table and justify it by pointing to the fiscal crisis in Medicare. And let’s stop paying Cargill, Monsanto and ADM to make us sick.

Tags: , , , ,

What We Can Learn From the Right

Jul 17

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | 1 Comment

In the last 35 years, Progressives have been lost in the policy wilderness. The parties have been up and down, but the shift of American politics has been inexorably to the right. The question is: why?

Let’s start by asking: what is the right? Broadly speaking, the Right started as a coalition of Libertarians, Theocrats, and Business types that might be at odds, but were unified by extreme anti-communism. When the Wall fell, the Right had achieved its ultimate object, but lost its unifying cause. Libertarians, Evangelicals, and Corporate executives seeking special market advantage through government will naturally be at odds about every significant issue.

“Liberalism” is a weak rallying point because, well, it doesn’t really exist. There are liberals in both houses of Congress, but no more than, say, Corvair fans. It would make just as much sense to construct a political philosophy around opposing the philatelist menace.

Yet these rebels without a cause have won every important political battle of the last thirty years! Clinton got elected, but couldn’t even pass a health care bill. He wound up abolishing AFDC, declaring the “era of big government is over,” deregulating the banks, keeping the inevitable tax hike limited to a one percent top bracket marginal bump, balancing the budget, and keeping the defense budget intact. The only concession the conservatives had to make was the letter after the President’s name. Clinton was the most effective Republican president of the Twentieth Century.

Then, they crooked their crazy nephew in, and he screwed the pooch. His administration was so corrupt and inept they actually managed to convince the smarter type of conservatives (all six of them) not to be conservatives any more. Still, they keep winning battles. They bottled up the Employee Free Choice Act, watered down the cap-and trade bill, gutted the stimulus bill, turned a slam-dunk Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a circus, and may well end up killing health care reform. And that’s with large Democratic majorities in both house and the White House in Democratic hands!

How do they pull off controlling the course of American politics without holding the seats of power? They control the terms of the debate. When the handful of Progressives that actually exist proposed that we reform our health care system by instituting a single-payer national insurance plan that will actually address the problems behind escalating health-care costs, we were told by our betters that it was politically impossible. One of the people delivering this message was our “Yes We Can,” “Change We Can Believe In,” “Muslim Socialist” President explaining, in conservative terms, that change would be too disruptive. We have to preserve a system of employer-based health insurance born out of the unique experience of World War II that no longer makes sense in a country where people change jobs every few years because it had somehow become “the American Way.” In one lifetime? Really?

Conservatives didn’t have to beat Barack Obama, and they didn’t have to join him. They swallowed him whole. This is why the Birthers are so crazy. They are so out there they don’t even realize they are unnecessary.

Conservatives have turned the preservation of corporate interests into a national religion. They control the language of national debates, they set the baseline of acceptable policies, and they have a stranglehold on my model voter, the radiology tech from Casselberry. When I talk politics with him, his questions, concerns, and objections may as well have been written by Frank Luntz himself.

They did it with money, time, and attacking ideas first and people second. The conservative foundations (Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Coors, Annenberg, et al.) committed themselves to funding the think tanks and media outlets that spread conservative ideas. These institutions plucked right-wingers out of college and gave them jobs, nurturing three generations of conservative leaders and providing an economic base for the movement. They established quiet, invite-only meetings in Washington where staffers, elected officials and lobbyists receive their marching orders. They maintain safe houses in the DC area so they don’t get caught influence-peddling and screwing around. They are a real movement.

We are a disorganized grab-bag of people motivated mostly by common attachment to basic decency and empirical reality. We splinter more easily than a balsa-wood glider in a hurricane, so we litter the landscape with tiny factions devoted to a handful of issues. At the end of the day, we lose all the major policy battles because they are all playing on the same team and we are not.

The first thing we need to learn is to stop trying to sell our issues to the public. This is a waste of time. Right-wingers didn’t control the economic policy debate by sending every American a copy of “The Road To Serfdom.” No, they convinced Americans that pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-consumer policies were anti-American. They used the existing Horatio Alger myth to good effect, equating General Electric with the Gold Rush spirit. There are now tens of millions of poor, mostly white men certain that any measure to protect them as workers or consumers is taking the money out of their pockets they will have when they, uh … win the lottery or something, they’re not sure, but however these abused people are going to get rich, they don’t want some bureaucrat taxing them to pay for vital services or telling them that cannot cheat their workers or poison their customers.

If we want to undo the incalculable damage these maniacs have done, we must be patient and think strategically. We must work through the universities, think tanks, and the media. We must discredit the Church of Gimmie, expose conservative policies as crony capitalism, espouse real markets and level playing fields, and make conservatives as ashamed of their c-word as Democrats were of the L-word for thirty years.

Then, when our viewpoint has permeated the culture, we insist that our party conform. We challenge any Democrat, no matter how powerful, who persists in conservative heresy and drum them out of our party. We take over from the counties to the Speaker’s office. Then, and only then, can we address global warming, worker’s rights, economic security, and equal rights for all Americans. Until we turn the Democratic Party democratic, then electing corporate “Democrats” is just a waste of time and money.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Clay Shirky – Organizing Without Organizations

Jul 15

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | No Comments

I find this an illuminating way to think about the cultural and political connotations of new media.

Tags: , , , ,

No More Easy Choices

Jul 11

Posted by Rob Field in Culture, Politics | No Comments

TV Bill Moyers JournalWe face a 63 trillion dollar fiscal iceberg over the next 75 years, mostly because we perversely allow private health insurance companies to “cherry-pick” young, healthy people out of the health-care system, leaving under-funded public systems to carry the burden of the most expensive patients. Conservatives have often maintained that the retirement of the Boomers is responsible for the impending fiscal crisis, but for the past 23 years, we have been over-paying our payroll taxes to finance the looming retirement of the Boomers. We should have been running surpluses for the last two decades. Where did our money go? Into tax cuts for the rich. Republicans and conservative Democrats stole several trillion dollars of our money. Now we are told we must sacrifice more even as the top one percent of the top one percent burn our children’s birthright in their private jets. Of course, anyone who points this out is a “socialist,” although apparently demanding, and getting, trillions in taxpayer subsidies is the epitome of free-market capitalism.

Even as the poles have been heating alarmingly for decades, the champions of corporate interests have fought a long delaying action, first denying the facts, then their meaning, and finally that we can’t solve the problem. Most human beings live within 300 miles of the sea, and all are threatened by a surge in global sea levels. Every living thing is tied intimately to the ecosystems that we disrupt so heedlessly, yet those who think this should be treated as the survival issue that it is are told to grow up, to live in the “real world” of fake politics and false impunity.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States, the supposed exemplar of freedom, maintains nearly a thousand major overseas bases and a dozen carrier battle groups roam the oceans of the planet, pursuing a global grand strategy of denial and disruption as if we were at war with the world. We cloak this aggression in the language of patriotism and sacrifice, as if the nameless villagers of Helmand Province who we have bombed out with quarter-billion dollar stealth bombers were a threat to the United States. This is an unconscionable drain on our wealth, our most vulnerable and dedicated citizens, our goodwill overseas, and our national energy and attention at a time of real threats to our survival.

Average Americans, we are told, will never make the sacrifices necessary to address the problems that we face. This is, as Bill Moyers would so eloquently say, “bull.” On last night’s program, Mr. Moyers gave an impassioned diagnosis of the state of American democracy. Our nation’s deeply flawed policies have nothing to do with the preferences of ordinary Americans. They are bought and paid for a handful of people whose wealth finances, and is subsidized and protected by, the special interest industry in Washington and the state capitals.

It was refreshing to hear such honesty on national television, but sobering to realize that about eleven people were watching. Our vaunted democracy is a sick joke. A tiny number of people participate in politics, and even fewer are well informed about policy. Public life is dominated by superstition and outright lies. Parties go up, parties go down, but policies never budge. American politics is a shadowplay. It has the same relationship to the way we are governed as fan fiction does to the plot of a television program.

We all know this, and it’s weird that we accept it. Our futures and freedoms have been stolen for nothing more than the private gain of a a handful of wealthy people, and all we care about is what’s on TV. If we want to save our country, we’re going to have to expect more from our fellow citizens and from ourselves.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Just In Case You Thought I Was Being Unfair To Stephen Bacon …

Jul 8

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Politics | 1 Comment

Tags: , , ,

Party at Flagler Airport! Woot! Woot!

Jul 7

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Politics | No Comments

Heather Beaven at Announcement SpeechOn Tuesday night, Heather Beaven had her announcement event at Flagler County Airport for the Seventh District House seat. The unfulfilled threat of rain moved the venue from the steps of the Flagler Courthouse to a bar on the edge of the airport. About a score of supporters showed up, sprinkled with seven staffers and volunteers. The candidate’s husband introduced the first speaker, the chairman of Beaven’s thesis committee, Henry Thomas.

Dr. Thomas praised Ms. Beaven’s intelligence, tenacity and integrity, then Mrs. Beaven spoke. She has an unusual style of combining soft Midwestern tones with chopped, two-step cadences. Her speech was a mixture of folksy idealism and polished rhetoric. She is an appealing person, coming off as relaxed and warm among the small cluster of supporters and friends. It’ll be interesting to see if more challenging circumstances bring out her harder side.

Speech over, the serious business of the evening commenced. Beaven’s campaign manager, Lisa Walker, hit up her supporters for contributions. Her supporters accepted the contribution envelopes noncommittally. Mario Piscatella, a between-jobs politico described by Beaven as “not really” staff and “not exactly” a volunteer seemed to be more-or-less running the event’s set-up, but after the speech focused on networking, eager to speak with a potential seeker for state-wide office. Beaven’s Stetson interns were there in force.

Beaven’s campaign is strong by recent standards in the Seventh. Ms. Walker has kept her Stetson crew in place while recruiting other young politically active people like Mr. Piscatella and Frank Karbassis. Beaven definitely has the beginnings of a campaign here. If she begins to raise money aggressively, she could do the impossible and send John Mica to K Street where he belongs. The evening, while not earth-shattering by any means, was very different from the stealth campaigns of Silva and Armitage and the strange ego trip of Stephen Bacon.

Tags: , , , ,

Our Asset Is Our People

Jul 3

Posted by Rob Field in Politics | No Comments

America faces an increasingly competitive world, and it seems increasingly clear that innovation and creativity will be the deciding factors in that competition. We will need to solve problems we are only beginning to grasp and reinvent our way of life to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Fortunately, in our best schools and universities, we are preparing young people to craft those solutions.

Unfortunately, about twenty percent of Americans seem not to be just left behind, but forgotten altogether, mired in inter-generational poverty, in places abandoned by industry and with weakened local governments straining to meet basic needs that the market cannot or will not provide. This, along with the related disorder in our health care system, explains why the United States slipped another three places last year to fifteenth place in the Human Development Index, which measures a broad range of factors including health, education and income.

This is not merely a moral or humanitarian concern. Hemmed in by Drug War and its attendant pathologies, shoved into schools unable to cope with children too burdened by nightmarish home lives to learn, these forgotten Americans represent a colossal drag on our economy and our national potential. We saw unmistakably how corrosive the systematic exclusion of the poor could be when Hurricane Katrina blew away the patina of civilization and exposed gangs of white New Orleanians patrolling their neighborhoods with guns, challenging and all too often shooting African-Americans fleeing the devastation in the lower Ninth Ward. A society in which the bottom twenty percent are on their own is one which we have to be afraid of each other, in which we need guns and alarm systems, in which we need to plant GPS devices in our children.

The reason why the aftermath of Katrina was so devastating for the GOP is that it highlighted the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Conservative agenda. After thirty years of domination of the national debate, Conservatives, with gutless Centrist Democrats as allies, had succeeded in almost all of their objectives. They had privatized much of the functions of government, handing the remnants to talentless cronies in utter contempt of the very idea of public service. They had gotten their free-trade bills and tax credits to outsourcers that had sped the flight of jobs from America. They had fought against all forms of publicly-funded family planning. They had gutted aid to the poor and housing assistance. They had capitalized politically on our distrust of one another and had helped fuel the worst fears and resentments. They had succeeded in “getting tough on crime,” turning America’s cities into war zones as drug gangs subsidized by failed policy occupied our streets and cramming our prisons with 2.3 million of our fellow citizens, most for minor offenses. Most of all, they had encouraged middle-class Americans to think that the poor were not their problem, that there was something wrong with them, that poverty was a choice.

The results were sprawled on our TV screens for all to see. So much attention was paid to the political effects of the aftermath, of the inept relief efforts, but the truly revealing things about Katrina were what happened before the storm hit, the society that Conservatism made. One storm was enough to convince Americans they didn’t want to live in that world. We are coming to the realization that we will pay now or pay later. We can cheaply educate and insure our citizens now, or expensively incarcerate and treat them in emergency rooms later. We can provide mixed-income housing now, or deal with concentrated pockets of misery and crime later. The longer we ignore the problems we face, the more the price tag goes up. These are our neighbors. There are no walls high enough to escape the consequences of their misery.

We’re not the only nation facing these problems, and far from the worst. But we seem unable to think clearly about the problems of mass poverty and exclusion and the threat that rising income inequalities pose to the cohesion of our society. This is not India or China with majority peasant populations. We have the resources and the mature political system to deal with these problems. What we lack is the will to address them seriously. So, as the long-term fiscal crisis this country faces becomes the greatest issue in political life, we must remember that we will pay now or we will pay later.

Tags: , ,

Charley Wiggins, 1948-2009

Jul 2

Posted by Rob Field in Florida, Life, Politics | No Comments

Funeral services are to be held Thursday, July 2, 2009 at Dudley Funeral Home

1108 N. Dixie Freeway

New Smyrna Beach, FL 32168.

The viewing is open from 11am – 1pm with the memorial service to follow.

Charley and I met on Clint Curtis’ campaign and served together in the Five Cities Democratic Club. His constant cheer and energy made the hard work of local activism easier.

He had plenty of rough spots and his bulk e-mails could sometimes make me squirm. I also don’t think he was pleased when I ran against the incumbent for Volusia DEC Chair. Despite it all, I’ll always remember Charley fondly.

Tags: , ,