We are the Ordinary People of Our Time

"[Howard Zinn's] fame and popularity came from helping us see America from the ground up - as ordinary people struggling to gain and hold their place in it. When no history book told that story as it should be told, he wrote the book himself -- A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. It became a perennial best seller."

Bill Moyers Journal, 1/29/10

Think of those who joined in — and in many cases became leaders of — the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, the gay rights movement, and so on.  Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in.

Bob Herbert, "A Radical Treasure",  1/29/10

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As the woes of this country escalate instead of dissipate, as millions of us go to bed each night knowing that we won't stop thinking about tomorrow, it's a pretty safe bet we're eventually going to work up to, and beyond, the point of just edgy. (I think we saw it in Massachusetts last week.  Yes, Martha Coakley had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the campaign trail, and probably deserved to lose, but why was she the candidate in the first place?  That was the best the Massachusetts Dems could do?)

In millions and millions and MILLIONS of households, every day is a new calamity.  Some if not most of these calamities are fixable with a little help from Those who Have--including the government, whose holdings are largely OURS anyway.  If they were seriously working on the jobs situation--creating them, bringing them back to America, being honest about what constitutes a livable wage--people would be seriously working.

If people were working, they would be living in their homes, not standing on the outside looking in. They would be buying groceries and trying on clothes and sitting for family portraits again.  They might even be turning up their thermostats.

If banks were making low-, or even reasonable-interest loans, the people with jobs would be purchasers again, entrepreneurs would be building small businesses again, and all who were honest enough would be paying their fair share of taxes again.

If some of those billionaires would stop worrying about how they'd survive if they suddenly became millionaires again, and see themselves less as the privileged few and more as the instigators of this mess, we might get out of this mess quicker.

If the U.S (as in United States) Chamber of Commerce became less the foul foreign-interest chamber pot and more the cheerleaders for true American commerce, those meaningless slogans about "jobs, jobs, jobs" might actually morph into jobs, jobs, American-made jobs.

But so far, none of those things are happening, and we're left with a conundrum:  How do we--that's WE, as in we, the citizens, the hoi polloi, the common people,  the teeming masses, the heedless multitudes--build up the strength to fix this?

The truth is, I don't know.  I've spent months thinking about this, ever since Barack Obama became president, and it all comes down to--I don't know.  So if you're still with me and you're waiting breathlessly for an answer, you might as well exhale. I'm just one lone person here, same as you, thinking hard, talking my head off, working up the energy to march to and against and for. . .without even a hint of a plan taking shape.

Frank Rich gave me a real eye-opener on Sunday when he wrote:  "The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit."

It's true.  The Democrats, my party for better or. . .dammit. . .bounce between lethargy and stupidity.  Harry "public option is too HARD" Reid was so riled up over what's happening around here, he merely yawned during the SOTU speech but didn't actually fall asleep.  Nancy Pelosi seems to think that grinning is the solution to everything.  And the Blue Dog Democrats take pride in being the infiltrators from the enemy camp.  The few who actually see some urgency in saving the country--damn the torpedoes--say all the right things but in voices so weak everybody gets away with pretending they can't hear them.
 
If you count the 535 house and senate members in Congress, plus the president, the vice president and the entire West Wing, plus the deputies and the assistants to the deputies, plus a whole slew of pundits who claim to know everything, that's a lot of people wandering around in a fog looking for answers to what ails us.

So a year later, here they are, bragging about unemployment numbers in the tens of thousands per month instead of hundreds of thousands,  still without a WPA-like emergency jobs program that would immediately put people to work rebuilding America, still without any hope of a health care reform bill that first and foremost addresses health.  And those are just the big things.

Obama gave his State of the Union speech early last week and then, a few days later, went to see the Republicans at what was laughingly called their "retreat" (they don't "retreat", we do).   I'm always looking for signs, it's true, but last week I might have seen the first signs of a leader ready to fight.
 Some words from our president that gave me hope:

"In this new decade, it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency, that embodies their strength.

 ". . .And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America.

". . .So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America.

". . .I took on health care because of the stories I've heard, from Americans with pre-existing conditions whose lives depend on getting coverage, patients who've been denied coverage, families, even those with insurance, who are just one illness away from financial ruin.
After nearly a century of trying -- Democratic administrations, Republican administrations -- we are closer than ever to bringing more security to the lives of so many Americans.
The approach we've taken would protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.  (This worries me.  What about the least worst practices?)

"...To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.

"...And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, a supermajority, then the responsibility to govern is now yours, as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.  So let's show the American people that we can do it together."

Near the end of his speech, he said,  "I don't quit.  We can't quit."   I loved hearing that.  It sounded as if we had started. 

At the Republican Retreat in Baltimore, Obama did a little hand-smacking:  (He did a lot of brown-nosing, too, but I expected that.)

"I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."

 Well, that was on Friday, so on Monday morning I tuned in to "Morning Joe" to hear Joe and bunch's take on the dressing-down in Baltimore.   When I got there, Mika was in the middle of reading a couple of paragraphs fromWSJ about Obama's detached style and his perceived lack of irony.  Joe latched onto it and every time someone said something favorable about either the SOTU speech or the Baltimore Q&A, Joe said, in effect, "Yes, but is he ironic?"

It came from this piece entitled, "The Obama Spell is Broken", by Fouad Ajami:
"We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.
In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America."

It takes some bodacious, mendacious audacity to write in the Wall Street Journal about hubris or ". . .a bureaucratic elite [that] disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will" after those not-so-long-ago (but really, really long) Bush years, but if anybody can pull it off, it's the WSJ.   Their audience has the most to lose if Obama wins his battles.

It's the ordinary people (that's us) who need to keep Obama where he is.   Underneath the "uniter" facade is a street fighter.  "Community organizer" is on his resume.  He knows what it's like to be ordinary.  So he might not have the answers, and I might not have the answers, and I might not know exactly where we're going (and he might not, either), but I'm picking sides.  That's something.

___________________________

Signs that I'm getting way too immersed in this "saving the country" business:  I saw this internet bumper sticker the other day and I immediately thought of congress:  "I'm not really slapping you, I'm just high-fiving your face."

This Wretched, Reckless Approach to Health Care: It's Killing Us

We may be slow learners, but the rest of the industrial world has figured it out: Universal, single-payer or national health care systems. That's the reason why all those other countries cover everyone, have better patient outcomes, cause no one to declare bankruptcy or lose their homes because of medical bills, and spend less than half per capita on health care than we do.
We could do it too, by reducing the starting age for Medicare from 65 to 0. There's still time to act.  -  Michael Moore,  Huffington Post, 9/29/09 _____________________________________________________________________

 It doesn't matter what you say.  It doesn't matter what I say.  It doesn't matter what Robert Reich says.  It doesn't matter what Bill Moyers says.  It doesn't matter what Wendell Potter says.  It doesn't matter what Michael Moore says:



It doesn't matter what Jay Rockefeller says.  It doesn't matter what Anthony Wiener says.  It especially doesn't matter what Barack Obama says.

What matters is this:  We, the citizens and taxpayers, may win a skirmish or two, but in the end Big Business will win the battle.  They owned us yesterday, they own us today, and unless we finally get wise and get tough, they'll own us tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

They own us because they've ceaselessly, endlessly, without thought of the consequences, bought and paid for the loyalties of the majority of our elected officials.

We haven't quite come to terms with it yet--mainly because we can't quite believe it. We expect that sort of maneuvering by the Republicans.  Going against the Common Good in favor of the capitalists is in their DNA.  They apparently can't help it.

But the Democrats?  The Democrats.   The Blue Dogs--those dirty dogs--have sold us out. But the Blue Dogs aren't the only ones.  Not by a long shot.  On the Senate side, Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad, Bill Nelson and Tom Carper all voted against the public option.  Not surprisingly, they've all had their fingers in the Health Care honey pot.  According to Raw Story, those five senators have up to now received some 19 million dollars from the opposition to health care reform.  That opposition being, of course, the Health Care industries.  Those industries, I have to remind myself, that are devoted to caring for our health.

Sixty votes is the magic number.  Sixty Senate "yea" votes means a filibuster-proof passage.  It's the number that, if it isn't there, stops everything.  Convenient, isn't it?  It means even those who side with the insurance companies but don't want to admit it have an easy out.  "Can't vote yet because we don't have the 60."  Okay.  So what?

Where are the Dems who, if they're too cowardly to go for Single Payer, will at least put the vote for Public Option out there?  If it's voted down, after jawing about it for hours or days or weeks, then start all over again.  Put it out there again.  And then again.  Wear those filiblustering bastards down.

Millions of sick people are without a safety net.  People who could be saved are dying here. There is no reason, save greed, that we don't have a government-sponsored health care system.  I know it.  You know it.  We all know it.  If it's not in our budget, then shame on them.  They built that bloated budget on taxpayer money coerced from us through fear and outright lies.  Now that we need it for actual Common Good, they're going to pretend it's asking too much.  No.  They've asked too much of us for too long.  Now it's payback time.  They owe us.

So what are we going to do about it?  How long does this conversation go on?  There are people in our government who are intent on holding this up, and they're out there openly, blatantly, recklessly, holding this up.  We know who they are.  And they know we know who they are.  And they don't care.

So what are we going to do about it?  Good God. . .are you as sick of this as I am?  Enough, already. There are some enormous asses out there for the prodding, so. . .where the hell is my pitchfork?

Ramona

(Cross-posted at Talking Points Memo here.)

Health Care - A Condition, not a Commodity

Let's get on with it, Mr. President. We're up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This health care thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution — the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as General Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory "Made in the USA." We could have said to the world, "Look what we did!" And we could have turned to each other and said, "Thank you."
As it is, we're about to get health care reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean this is topsy-turvy — we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity.
 Bill Moyers, September 5, 2009

This is Saturday night on the Labor Day weekend, and I have no illusions about anybody stopping whatever they're doing to read this, so I won't take long.

Bill Moyers has been tireless in his efforts to get through to the President the importance of universal, equitable health care.  This isn't something he--or we--can afford to put off.  Millions are without health care, millions are without jobs, millions are without homes, millions are without money.  If this isn't the time to push for health care as an inalienable right for all Americans, I don't know when that will be.

I wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to read the transcript and/or watch Bill Moyers' clip:

I have talked about labor issues and health care on my own blog, as have thousands of others, but I'm writing this today to beg you to watch and read what Bill Moyers said on his program last night.


http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/09/bill_moyers_on_obamas_moment.html#c259311

President Obama, we need at LEAST a public option. Please stop letting the insurance providers set our health care policy. They've bamboozled and defrauded us long enough. Why on earth would you even think of rewarding them yet again?


You made promises about health care that encouraged millions of us to trust you, to vote for you, to work for you. With so many millions underpaid or out of work, we cannot afford to make weak compromises on the health issue. You need to be strong now, and you need to know that we're with you. People are suffering and you can make it right. Remember that when you give your speech on Wednesday night.

Not exactly Moyers quality, but I figure if each of us lets him know in our own words how we feel about the coming health care compromises he'll know it's not all teabaggers and townhallers out there letting their voices be heard.

Write him here and do it before Wednesday:  (I know it's a holiday, but it's a holiday commemorating and celebrating the American work force, past and present.  Do this for them  Please)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Ramona

(Cross-posted at Talking Points Memo here.)

My Words on Bill Moyers' Lips - I'm Speechless

I missed Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night, and I was away from home all day yesterday until about 8 PM, so I had no idea that the end paragraph of my lowly blog about Moyers' interview with Wendell Potter made it onto the top of his show. (The clip shows my blog at Talking Points Memo but the content is the same as the original post here.)



Rowan Wolf over at Talking Points Memo Cafe saw it, blogged about it and put it on YouTube. To say I'm pretty stunned by this is a total understatement, and normally I don't like to toot my own horn, but this may be my 15 seconds of fame, so you'll have to forgive me for this, please.

I really want to talk about how blogs and bloggers have come out of the shadows and onto the battlefield. It's becoming a powerful vehicle for change, but with that comes the same kind of responsibility that journalists advocate but don't always follow. There are thousands of political bloggers out there now, and picking and choosing is a daunting, time-consuming occupation. Our political views are often going to be different, but the one thing we should be able to agree on is that we've come to this new vehicle for change with the understanding that we have an obligation to tell the truth as we see it and understand it. We'll make mistakes--plenty of them. Most of us are not professionals, after all, and our passion is bound to get in the way of clear thinking and good judgment some of the time. But our voices are out there; we're growing stronger, and I believe this country will be the better for it.

I came late to blogging. I just didn't get it. So much of what I saw was superficial, shallow navel-gazing--a kind of helter-skelter motor-mouth. Every thought, worthy or not, was transported onto a personal page for everyone to read--even those just merely, superficially interested.

I think it was the blogs on The Daily Kos that first convinced me it could be used to pull whole communities of people with common interests together so that one voice became many, and many voices could ultimately gain the power to change things.

I started my own blog here on January 20, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration. I remember hesitating for a long time before I hit the "Publish Post" button. It seemed like such a conceited, ego-driven kind of thing to do, but after the past eight years, and after the heady jubilance of the Obama victory, the passion to do something was overwhelming.

All I can do, really, is write. I'm not good at organizing or speechifying or getting on the telephone to try and convince anybody of anything. Writing is re-writing, and since I never get my thoughts straight the first time, it's the perfect vehicle for me. But I wanted my blog to include more than just my voice. I wanted it to be an open outlet for the blogs, articles, columns and videos so many of us were sending to one another by email almost every day. I've created links to many of them, but there are so many good writers out there who have a voice and are working hard to get themselves heard. It's becoming a real movement now, and outlets like Talking Points Memo are right at the forefront.

Somewhere along the way, Iwas lucky enough to find Talking Points Memo and the TPM Cafe. A whole new world! Intimidating at first because, man, are they smart! But I started a blog there and they welcomed me with a generosity that actually kind of floored me. My comment section here on this blog remains forelorn and lonely, but at TPM the comments sections are lively and boisterous -- full of good talk and good information. You can always count on the commenters to make you get it right. That's the terrifying beauty of political blogging--we're all opinionators and we make our opinions known!

But this one blog about Moyers and Potter must have struck a tiny nerve. My Blogspot blog had 162 hits that day and the next, and it received 656 Diggs--all because it was posted on TPM.

We have the power to make change. On my last post, I was wallowing in Faithlessness, but today I'm energized. And all because Bill Moyers spoke my words for a few seconds on his show. Okay, I'm ready to get back to work. Health care, labor, education, voter fraud, congressional shenanigans, shameless fat cats--bring 'em on.

What can I say? I'm easy.

Ramona

Bill Moyers shines light on the health insurance mess - a Journalistic Best

There are so few mainstream investigative journalists in this country anymore, I have to wonder in whose pockets the MSM has cozily slipped--and why.

When one of our best investigative newspapers has slipped to such depths that it's publisher invites health insurance execs hellbent on killing any hint of public options to hobnob with, and thus lobby, top-level White House officials at a private soiree in her own home (but only if they fork over $25,000), and when nobody else seems to notice or care, we can give up any remaining quaint notion of a watchdog press.

We're on our own, folks, and if not for the precious few like Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow, we would be dead in the water. They are the mainstream media remnants of a once-proud profession and we need to treat them like the treasures they really are.

They study the issues, they bring on guests who can discuss them intelligently, they ask the right questions, they give their guests time to answer thoughtfully, they continue the conversation with smart follow-ups, and best of all, they don't give up their precious air time to raucous, spitting catfights between notoriously biased opponents.

Last week, Bill Moyers brought to our attention two important stories. (See above for the first one)

On "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS Friday night, Bill talked with Wendell Potter, a former Cigna exec turned whistleblower. In Potter's own startling words (startling not because we didn't know, but because a former insider, someone who, less than two years before, was a practicing purveyor of these professed sleazy tactics, said them):

“The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that you're heading down the slippery slope towards socialism... I think that people who are strong advocates of our health care system remaining as it is, very much a free market health care system, fail to realize that we're really talking about human beings here, and it doesn't work as well as they would like it to... They are trying to make you worry and fear a government bureaucrat being between you and your doctor. What you have now is a corporate bureaucrat between you and your doctor... The public plan would do a lot to keep [health insurance companies] honest, because it would have to offer a standard benefit plan. It would have to operate more efficiently, as does the Medicare program. It would be structured, I’m certain, on a level playing field so that it wouldn’t [have an] unfair advantage [over] the private insurance companies. Because it could be administered more efficiently, the private insurers would have to operate more efficiently.”

The interview is a half-hour long. Later into it he outlines the insurance industry's efforts to discredit Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko", when they saw the truth in it and were afraid the American people might believe it, too. This to me was a stunning admission, the entire interview an astonishing piece of journalism--again, not entirely surprising, but I saw a door opening, enough for us to wedge our foot in. Wan rays of sunshine about to turn dazzling, if only we can keep the momentum going.

I beg everyone who reads this and clicks onto the link to send it on to everyone you know. Send it to your congressmen, your governors, your legislatures, the White House. Get an email chain going--put the link up on yard signs or billboards. Put it on bumper stickers. Stencil it on tee-shirts or tattoo it onto your forehead. Whatever it takes.

This is a television event too important to let die. Please. Keep it alive. Keep it going. It's up to us now.

(Cross-posted on Talking Points Memo here)

Ramona

Sliding Toward a More Social Union

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
Warren Buffett
________________________________

Throughout the entire reign of the devastating Bush years, and even during the pro-business Clinton years, (when we all watched Bill Clinton cozy up to the Republicans in a misguided and futile attempt to make them stop their incessant bullying), I felt like the lone voice whimpering that you just can't let raging Capitalism take hold without allowing social consciousness to follow in its wake, caring for the inevitable battered and bloodied.

Capitalism, by its very nature, rewards greed. Greed, by its very nature, rewards selfishness. A country that claims to be By the People, For the People, and Of the People can't afford to give Greed its day.

If you want to call a recognition of the need for social programs "Socialism", fine with me. I've argued for a long time that Capitalism has to get in bed with Socialism in order to survive. I've argued, too, that Socialism has to suck up to Capitalism in order to--okay--get its programs funded.

Michael Winship wrote a piece in Bill Moyers' Journal's The Blog yesterday called, "Oh, what a lovely class war!". He starts it this way:

"My goodness, how they howl when the proverbial shoe is on the proverbial other foot. You’d think the Red Army had just left Moscow and was preparing a frontal assault on the Federal Reserve.

So what are conservatives, Wall Street and financial television commentators shouting? Socialists! That's right. Spread the word: Socialists are swarming over our nation's capitol, and making off with the means of production, otherwise known as campaign contributions and the Federal budget. You got trouble, my friends."

To Michelle Malkin the opposite of Socialism is apparently "individual responsibility". Is that what we've seen for the past eight to twelve years? Individual responsibility? Which individuals were responsible for screwing the American people out of their livelihoods, out of their homes, out of any chance at getting quality health care? How exactly does this individual responsibility work? Every person is an island? We don't need no lousy handouts? Tell that to the Fat Cats who not only had their hands out, they had their vaults open, ready to be filled with OUR money.

North Carolina senator Jim DeMint doesn't want a thing to do with nationalizing banks, and he uses the threat of "socialism" to make his argument: "I think the idea of nationalization is the same idea as socialization," DeMint said. "I think we need to do everything we can to make the private markets work and not use this as an excuse to expand government into owning banks and other companies."A little late for that, Jim. The private markets blew it. That's why we're where we are now. If even the slightest hint of regulation had been in the mix, we might not now be looking at having to own the banks in order to make them do right by us. (Or we might not be watching Bernie Madoff this very day do the perp walk to face the thousands he swindled out of billions without fear of detection.)

We're in a mess now, and the people who put us there want a chance to mess it up again. We can't let them. We must allow this administration to bring in their interpretation of a New Deal. The Reaganites are wrong when they say the best government is no government. Barack Obama is right when he says the best government is good government. And right now good government is BIG government--like it or not.

What we're hearing now is the bleating sounds of sheep dying a hard death. Pay no attention. We don't have time for them.

Ramona