Talking Points for Healthcare Reform

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1. When you need life-saving care, private insurance companies only profit by denying you and letting you die. If you have payed your premiums on time all your life, you're as likely to be dropped by your private insurance company when you need life-saving care as you are to get treated. A public option gives you a lifeline.

2. Private insurance companies are spending over $1M a day to kill the public option by inventing phony citizen groups, and trying to scare the elderly about euthanasia and pro-lifers with abortion; they know the only way to kill reform is to get people of good conscience fighting, while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't think very highly of our intelligence.

3. We pay more than any other country to be 24th in life expectancy: while the average Canadian family spends less than $2000 a year on health care with no waiting periods, the average American family spends $29,000 a year, waiting for private insurance companies to approve every procedure.

4. 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day; 46M are uninsured.

5. 18,000 Americans DIE each year due to lack of health care: THAT'S 50 A DAY.

6. Two-thirds of American personal bankruptcies are related to health care costs.

7. Businesses - particularly small businesses - cannot afford to provide health insurance for their employees under the current employer based private insurance system, and will be forced to either drop their coverage or go out of business unless a public option is passed.

8. One-sixth of all our government spending is on health care, twice as much as any other country spends out of its budget. Our nation pays $2.5 trillion for care costing $912 billion .

9. Every independent estimate says the public option will save us money, from saving 150 billion dollars (CBO) to saving 265 billion dollars (Commonwealth). The Congressional Budget Office estimates the current bill in the House would leave a 6 billion dollar surplus.

10. So - if you'd rather spend more taxpayer money, bankrupt businesses, AND pay $29,000 a year for your family's private insurance coverage in exchange for a policy that can be dumped the second you actually need it, then the current system is great for you. If you'd rather spend less, wait less, have less of a chance of dying, and want to remove the corporate bureaucrat from between you and your doctor, then a public option is the way to go. Right now, even if you're lucky enough not to be dropped by your provider when you need urgent medical care, your private insurance company can overrule your doctor's advice for life-saving treatment and only offer to cover something cheaper; a public option would remove that middleman and leave these decisions where they belong, between the patient and doctor.

via Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

How can the richest people in the world allow millions to be homeless and without health care. Fifty American's die every day!

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Jackson's web of fraud and pill addiction is revealed

Prescription drugs are as popular and as dangerous as crack in the wrong hands.

Michael Jackson via last.fm

AddictionInfo.org

The shocking extent of Michael Jackson's addiction to prescription drugs and the level of the fraud committed to obtain them have been exposed by documents released in California.
His father insisted yesterday that "foul play" had been involved in the singer's death. Joe Jackson made the claim in a US TV interview, but would not give any further details.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles police chief William Bratton refused to rule out any possible cause, including homicide, and said the coroner's report into Jackson's death would be his guide.
Police are looking at his prescription history and trying to talk with his numerous former doctors, Mr Bratton said.
The singer swallowed more than ten Xanax pills every night, with bottles of the powerful anti-anxiety drug among medications prescribed in the names of Jackson's bodyguards and staff found in his room.
Police discovered illegally obtained sedatives, anaesthetics, painkillers and steroids at Jackson's Neverland Ranch in 2003 while investigating child molestation claims against him.
The revelations come in previously sealed papers obtained from the Santa Barbara County sheriff's department, two weeks after the troubled performer died.
The documents, which include transcripts of interviews with bodyguards claiming he was often "out of it and sedated", are the first tangible evidence of his long-term addiction.
The police raid, for instance, found numerous medicines, including several vials of the sedatives Versed and Promethazine; a vial of the hospital-strength anaesthetic Demerol; a bottle of steroid Prednisone; a bottle of the painkiller Percocet; syringes, oxygen tanks and a variety of unidentified loose pills.
In addition, there was a hand-scribbled and badly spelled note found with the drugs, possibly written by Jackson as he spoke to a doctor on the phone.
"Buprenex does the same as demerol, the only difference is you can't become an addict on Buprenex," the writing said.
The note likens the high-strength painkiller, correctly spelled Buprinex, to "synthetic Demeroll. 2 viles. I would feel safe havin it in case of axident."
An investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department into Jackson's death has focused on a number of medical professionals whom he hired privately.
William Bratton, the department's chief, said yesterday that there was a possibility it could become a criminal case.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office, meanwhile, has issued a subpoena for Jackson's medical records from more than a dozen doctors who attended him from 1993 until his death, aged 50, sources say.

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As multiple-death shootings surge, Congress looks away

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Minnesota Independent

Last month in Southern Alabama, an unemployed twenty-something sheet-metal worker armed himself with two semi-automatic rifles, a shotgun and a pistol. He shot his mother and the four family dogs, and then drove to a neighboring town where he killed four more relatives, four passersby, and then himself. All in all, he sprayed more than 200 bullets across two Alabama counties. The ages of the victims ranged from 74 years to 18 months. It was the worst killing spree in state history.
Since then other parts of the country have suffered similar nightmares. Indeed, in recent weeks more than 60 people -- including seven police officers -- have been killed in multiple-death shootings from coast to coast. It's just the type of headline-grabbing trend that might usually get congressional lawmakers screaming from the rafters for policy reforms, like banning military-style assault weapons and forcing gun-show vendors to do background checks on prospective buyers. Gun control advocates argue that such steps would help stem the more than 30,000 gun deaths that plague the United States each year.
But that hasn't been the case. Instead, the reaction from congressional leaders -- even the most vocal gun-reform proponents -- has been a long, strange silence.
It wasn't always this way. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was the author of the successful 1994 effort to install an assault weapons ban, which expired five years ago. Yet last week, less than a month after four police officers were killed in a shooting spree in Oakland, Feinstein told "60 Minutes" that, while she hopes to reintroduce the measure, "I wouldn't bring it up now."
Similarly, President Obama -- who campaigned on a platform of renewing the assault weapons ban -- reiterated his support for that prohibition during a visit to Mexico last week, but added that that he's not "under any illusions that reinstating that ban would be easy."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is another long-time advocate for tightening gun laws. Yet pressed this month about the absence of any gun reform push in Congress, she offered only a vague explanation about the need "to find some level of compromise."
Spokespersons for both Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said there's no plan on the horizon for gun reform legislation this year.
The reason is no mystery. Although Democrats expanded their majorities in both chambers of Congress last year, they owe those gains largely to more moderate members, who picked up seats in a number of conservative-leaning states that have historically gone Republican. Indeed, when Attorney General Eric Holder in February announced his support for renewal of the assault weapons ban, 65 House Democrats wrote to the White House attacking the proposal.
"Law-abiding Americans use these guns for all the same reasons they use any other kind of gun - competitive shooting, hunting and defending their homes and families," the Democrats wrote.
Not only do those members not want to be seen threatening their constituents' Second Amendment rights, but Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are bending over backwards to ensure that those seats remain Democratic in elections to come. In this political environment, congressional aids say, even a gun reform push from liberal Democrats would only divide the party and undermine other legislative priorities.
"What's the sense in expending a good amount of political capital?" asked a House Democratic aide, who asked to remain anonymous due to the political nature of the topic. "You know you're going to lose. You know you don't have the votes ... It's never good when leadership loses a vote, and this is a vote they'll lose."
Then there's the issue of lobbying. The pro-gun National Rifle Association is among the most powerful forces in all of Washington. In the 2008 election cycle alone, the NRA's political action committee spent $15.6 million on campaign activities, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And the group keeps tabs on every vote even remotely related to gun reform, threatening lawmakers with poor NRA rankings if they vote against the lobby's agenda.
The NRA did not reply to a call requesting comment, but the prowess of the gun lobby was in full display earlier this year during congressional debate on legislation to grant a voting representative to the residents of Washington, DC. That bill passed the Senate in February, but not before the NRA swayed lawmakers to attach language all but scrapping Washington's gun control laws, which are among the strictest in the nation. Faced with the gun-policy wildcard, stymied House Democrats have refused to bring the bill to the floor.
The reason is simple. The combination of support from Republicans and moderate Democrats all but ensures that the bill would pass. "On this issue, the NRA controls the House," said the Democratic aide. "It's that simple. We're in a political environment in which not much can be done because of the levels of power."
That's bad news for gun control advocates, who are pushing a series of reforms to tighten the nation's gun laws. Aside from reinstating the assault weapons ban, advocates want to force all gun-show vendors, even those unlicensed, to conduct background checks on potential customers to prevent felons and other violent criminals from obtaining weapons -- the same requirements currently in place for licensed gun sellers. A Senate bill, sponsored in the last Congress by Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Jack Reed (D-Del.), would do just that, but it hasn't resurfaced this year.
Another proposed reform would force gun makers to adopt a new technology that engraves weapons microscopically with their make, model and serial number -- information that would be left imprinted on the bullet casing after the gun is fired. Such a proposal was pushed by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) in the last Congress, but it as well has yet to appear this year. All three reforms are supported by public service groups, like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, but have been assailed by the gun lobby as initial steps toward an all-out gun ban.
Lawmakers are insisting that gun reform hasn't fallen off their radar, but some gun control advocates are growing impatient. "There are a lot of politicians," said Doug Pennington, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "even in the face of the mass shootings over the past six weeks, who aren't exactly sure how stiff their backbones are."
The debate arrives as a wave of high-profile gun violence has swept across the country in recent weeks. On March 29, a heavily armed gunman killed eight in a North Carolina nursing home. A day later, an IT professional opened fire on his family in Santa Clara, killing six people, including himself. In Binghampton, N.Y., on April 3, a gunman walked into a community center and killed 13 immigrants before turning a gun on himself. A day later, a 22-year-old Pittsburgh man barricaded himself in his home with a stash of assault weapons, killing three police officers in the stand-off. The list goes on.
Michael Bailey, political science professor at Georgetown University, pointed out that, despite the gruesome trend, there simply isn't the public outcry to inspire Congress to stick their necks out for something as controversial as gun reform. "As terrible as these tragedies were," Bailey wrote in an email, "there doesn't seem to be any appetite for thinking about them."
Even without the recent spate of gun deaths, the debate would be timely. Last Thursday marked the two-year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead, including the gunman. And Tuesday marks the 10-year anniversary of Colorado's Columbine High School massacre, in which two seniors killed 12 students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves.
In the absence of any federal movement, some state and local lawmakers have emerged in an effort to fill the void. Last week, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg visited Virginia to urge state lawmakers to pass a bill closing the so-called "gun-show loophole."
"Criminals do not have the right to own guns, and the gun shows make it far too easy for them to acquire guns," Bloomberg said. "In fact, it's easier for a criminal to buy a gun at a gun show than it is for a 20-year-old to buy a beer or for anyone to rent a car."
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Ed Rendell (D) has thrust himself into the debate as well, pushing last week for lawmakers to take up the assault weapons ban -- a prickly topic in a blue-collar state where unlimited gun rights are deemed by many to be sacrosanct.
"They're made for only one purpose," Rendell said of assault weapons. "Not for sport, not for hunting, nobody uses them in a duck blind, nobody uses them at the Olympics. They are used to kill and maim."
Advocates for gun reforms are quick to concede that the proposed reforms wouldn't prevent many of the gun-related deaths that torment the United States. Only one of the guns used by the Alabama shooter, for example, would have been prohibited under the 1994 assault weapons ban. Still, they maintain, taking some steps to keep military-grade weapons off the streets -- and all weapons out of the hands of violent criminals -- would go a long way toward improving safety in a country where firearms kill more than 80 people every day.
"That's not normal," Pennington said of the enormous number of domestic gun deaths. "We shouldn't treat that as just the cost of living in America."
Mike Lillis is Congress reporter for the Washington Independent.

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Progressive Revolution: We Can't Afford to Play Small-Ball and Tip-Toe Around Right-Wingers Anymore

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Alternet.org

The following is an excerpt from chapter 8 of Mike Lux's new book, "The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be" (Wiley, 2009). In this text, Lux argues that a "culture of caution" dominates Democratic politics in the modern era: "When you try something big and fail, even if the failure is due in great part to your own timidity, you only become more cautious. The failure of health-care reform made President Clinton more cautious, and he started playing small ball." As Obama's inauguration approaches, progressives and Democrats in Washington need to overcome their fears of proposing bold policies and stand up for the kind of America they believe in.
When Barack Obama based much of his 2008 Presidential campaign on the theme of hope, he certainly wasn't the first candidate to make that pitch. And when John McCain, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, during the years since 9/11, preached fear and more fear and nothing but fear, they weren't the first to do that, either. The entire history of American political debate can, in some sense, be described as the argument between the hope of progressives for a better future vs. the fear of conservatives who want to protect the way things are now.
In recent decades, neither party has been able to get a toehold as an enduring political majority. The Republicans' problem has been that they aggressively overreach, and then their rather extreme policy prescriptions just don't work. We get wars with no exit plans, side tax cuts that result in gigantic deficits, and voluntary goals for industry that never result in anything tangible happening.
For Democrats, the problem has been the opposite. They have been so beaten down by the conservative attack machine that they have allowed themselves to get into the habit of being cautious. When in power, they have had decent policy ideas that have produced pretty good results, but the results aren't substantial enough to make permanent changes or get voters excited about what Democrats are trying to accomplish. Since the tumultuous change decade of the 1960s and the ugly backlash that followed it, Democrats have often been too scared to think big about progressive change, and it has hurt them. ...
Fear and Conservatism
Fear has been a staple of every generation of conservatives .... Fear of the democratic mob. Fear of the freed slave. Fear of the liberated woman destroying the traditional family. Fear of freethinkers destroying religion. Fear of communism. Fear of gays and lesbians. Fear of hippies, "free love," and the drug culture. Fear of the immigrant. In a bizarre twist, Social Darwinism gave us fear of the weak, and in the modern version of Social Darwinism, Reagan gave us fear of the poor on welfare. Post-9/11, you can now add in the ever-potent fear of terrorism. Sadly, while some of those fears have faded with the passage of history, many remain with us, still powerful.
Many conservatives still fear feminism, sometimes to a hilarious degree. Here is one of my all-time favorite quotes, from the inimitable Pat Robertson: "[Feminism] is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
I had no idea feminism was so comprehensive, but there you have it. Of course, many men who are threatened by strong women aren't quite so hysterical, but like threatened people everywhere, they love to mock. Rush Limbaugh, who coined the feminazi, has this definition of feminism: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."
The prospect of empowered women isn't the only fear that conservatives have carried throughout the years of our nation's existence. They have always feared free thinking, which opens the door to a range of ideas and beliefs. The notion that their children might be exposed to any ideas or scientific theories that are different from what is being taught at home, as exemplified by the battles that are fought daily about public education, still scares conservatives a great deal. Read articles from any local newspaper about the nature of their resistance-to the teaching of evolution, the discussion of global warming, the assignment of certain books by English teachers, and so on-and you will see parents who are terrified that their own children might learn a way of thinking contrary to their own.
Fears of communism and welfare have faded somewhat in the last twenty years because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the passage of welfare reform, but they have been quickly replaced by conservatives' finding new things to scare voters with. Terrorism and immigrants have become the new hot-button excuses for pushing the political fear button. Or maybe I should amend that: terrorism, at least, is relatively new as a major fear for voters because until 9/11, people knew it could be a problem but didn't worry about it much. After 9/11, it became the biggest thing Americans were scared of. Immigration, on the other hand, is a very old fear that conservatives have been exploiting with renewed vigor in recent years.
In the early days of the United States, immigrants were generally quite welcome because the country had an ever expanding need for new workers, farmers, and pioneers to go out west. But by the 1850s, as more poor and working-class Irish journeyed across the Atlantic to settle here, the combination of anti-poor and anti-Catholic bigotry stirred up the vicious anti-immigrant movement called, appropriately enough, the Know-Nothings (the name came from the fact that their leaders swore an oath of secrecy about being involved in the movement, so that if asked about it, they said they knew nothing).
To join the organization of the original Know-Nothing movement, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, you had to be white and male, be born in the United States, and not only be Protestant but have no family connection whatsoever to Catholicism. The Know-Nothing political party, called the American Party, won nine gubernatorial seats and controlled at least one branch of the legislature in six states during the mid-1850s. It ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in the 1856 election, and he received about a quarter of the votes. But the movement quickly faded because the slavery issue soon overwhelmed everything else.
Throughout the late 1800s, another conservative period in U.S. history, immigration was regularly featured in the American political debate. Concerns about Chinese immigrants in California and Irish immigrants in the east were a constant refrain in the arguments against voting rights and civil rights. Sadly, even the populist movement was tainted by anti-immigrant rhetoric, as well as by its alliance with southern segregationists.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major restriction on immigration. Passed in 1882, it prohibited most immigration from Asia and took away the right of Chinese immigrants to become citizens. However, it was after World War I that anti-immigrant zeal truly reached its peak. Fearing a wave of postwar refugees and gripped by the conservative frenzy of the times, Congress passed legislation, in 1921 and 1924, that restricted immigration. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited European immigration to 3 percent of the total population of each European nationality living in the United States as of 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924 went much further, limiting European immigration to 2 percent of each nationality living in the United States as of 1890.
Just as conservatives do today, back then they also used people's fear of immigrants to attack other progressive ideas and legislation. Congressional opponents of the 14th and 15th amendments, for example, worried that immigrants would take advantage of these new voting rights. In the 1920s and earlier, immigrant bashers were anxious about what kinds of communists, socialists, and anarchists might be coming over to contaminate our population.
For example, a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily American printed the following editorial in April 1881:
Steamships are vomiting forth rotten cargoes of a thousand Chinese fortnightly, smitten and cursed with the plague of small-pox, and with other deadly plagues. The one-hundred thousand Chinese on this coast today, without family ties, with no elements of a prosperous immigration, the bronze locusts from Asia, plague-bearing[,] are eating out the substance which rightly belongs to the patrimony of the people.The single Chinese immigrant does, in this sense, usurp the place of a family. Trades and industries languish. The evils of Chinese immigration are upon us full force, aggregated by obstructions which originated with politicians who care more for some petty interest of party (the democratic party) than for the great and vital interests of the country.
If you think that was then and things have progressed, here are a couple of quotes from the current leadership of the anti immigration movement. The first comes from Congressman Virgil Goode of Virginia, who gained notoriety when he criticized Keith Ellison's choice to be sworn in using a copy of the Koran, rather than the Bible. Good warned his constituents, "If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office." He also had this to say about Hispanic immigration: "My message to them is, not in two weeks, not in two months, not in two years, never! We must be clear that we will not surrender America and we will not turn the United States over to the invaders from south of the border."
Another anti-immigration leader, Joseph Turner -- a staff member of the most powerful anti-immigration lobbying group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- recently said this in a letter to anti-immigration contributors: "Our enemies are bloodied and beaten. We cannot relent. Our boot is on their throat and we must have the willingness to crush their "throat" so that we can put our enemy down for good. The sovereignty of our nation and the future of our culture and civilization are at stake. The United States culture is man's salvation. If we perish, man perishes."
These statements were made in 2006 and 2007, not in some long-ago debate when social conventions and attitudes were different. And they were not the ravings of marginal crazies or rabid talk-show hosts; they were made by a senior member of the Republican caucus in Congress and by a leader of one of the biggest organizations working on the anti-immigration side of the aisle.
These are legitimate issues to debate in terms of immigration policy. Having better border security is a good thing, and we should be worried about corporations that try to exploit immigrant labor. But we can work those issues through and create a legitimate path to citizenship for immigrants without resorting to the fearmongering of the right wing.
Just as stopping the spread of totalitarian communism and keeping us safe from Soviet aggression during the Cold War were important objectives, today we need to deal with the real threat of terrorism. Many thoughtful suggestions, such as those generated by the Hart-Rudman commission and the 9/11 Commission, have been put forward. Important issues like securing the uranium from old Soviet weapons sites and keeping it away from the hands of terrorists, as well as safeguarding our own country's nuclear and chemical facilities to a greater degree, ought to be priorities for the U.S. government. What is fundamentally wrong, though, is turning the fear of terrorism into a political football, as Bush, Cheney, and other right-wingers have done.
Here's George W. Bush in 2004: "The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. That's what's at stake in this election."
And Dick Cheney: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again-that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."
Comparing a politician to Joe McCarthy is pretty strong stuff, but I find it hard to avoid the comparison when we live in a time when government officials spout the rhetoric I've just quoted. Using fear to justify virtually everything you want to do-from torture to absurd levels of government secrecy, to a war with no exit plan, to no-bid contracts for your biggest contributors, to violating the law and the constitution with warrantless wiretapping-is fundamentally wrong. Just as John Dean said that the Bush administration scandals have been the worst since Watergate, I'd be inclined to argue that Bush's and the Republicans' fearmongering over terrorism has been worse than McCarthy's fearmongering over Communism. ...
On my blog, OpenLeft.com, I have written about the timidity of Democrats in terms of both policy and politics. I call it the "culture of caution," a name I thought of in 2005 when my Democratic friends on Capitol Hill began to talk about the Republicans' culture of corruption. I liked that phrase and used it a lot myself in attacking the Republicans in 2005 and 2006, but I also thought, well, that is their problem, while ours is a culture of caution. ...
The Culture of Caution
In the culture of caution that dominates Democratic politics in the modern era, when you try something big and fail, even if the failure is due in great part to your own timidity, you only become more cautious. The failure of health-care reform made President Clinton more cautious, and he started playing small ball. President Clinton famously advocated support for things like school uniforms and agreed to support bad Republican bills on welfare reform and telecommunications reform. Clinton deserves credit for standing up to Republicans in the 1995 budget showdown, a decision that was the most important factor in his winning re-election, and for the other achievements I mentioned previously. For the most part, however, his last six years in office were a time of very modest policy ideas.
The culture of caution hurt the Democrats' political strategy as well. When the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment fight with the Republicans reared their ugly heads in 1998, I was working for the progressive group People for the American Way. We got heavily involved in opposing the impeachment and worked alongside the activists who eventually started MoveOn.org. We ran ads saying that it was time for the country to stop worrying about a sex scandal and "move on." Many Democratic politicians were horrified at those ads, convinced that by mentioning the issue we would just remind voters of what they didn't like about Clinton. We were asked by the party committees and the top members of Congress to pull them, but our focus groups had convinced us that we were right and should stand out ground. The message worked so well that candidates running in competitive races started to use the message in the ads, and, eventually, even the party committees did as well. Democrats picked up five seats in the 1998 elections and thereby stunned the pundits of conventional wisdom, who had widely predicted Democratic losses of thirty seats or more in Congress. It was the best showing for the party of a president in his sixth year in office in history since 1822, when James Monroe essentially had no opposition party. But Democrats would likely have won control of Congress if the Democratic establishment had not been so cautious for so long about facing the impeachment issue.
When Bush took over and exhibited an aggressive form of ideological partisanship never before seen in modern history, Democrats sometimes stood up to him, but all too frequently, they rolled over. This was especially true on national security and civil liberties issues after 9/11.
In 2002, when the authorization vote on the Iraq War came up, I was told in confidence by a top aide to Dick Gephardt that if Democrats would cut a deal with Bush on the war, the issue would go away and Democrats would win the 2002 election on domestic issues. That same cycle, I was told by a top pollster for the party committees that Democrats should just avoid talking about national security altogether because it wasn't our strongest issue.
Of course, this strategy didn't work out so well, as Democrats went down to an ugly defeat in the 2002 election, where security issues dominated. In fact, Gephardt's strategy of cutting a deal with Bush was a political disaster. Progressive antiwar Democrats were divided and discouraged, and the Republicans attacked the Democrats just as hard as they would have otherwise on national security. The deal also played out poorly in the 2004 elections because John Kerry could never quite explain why he had voted for the war, even though he later said that he opposed it.
The most aggravating thing about the Democratic culture of caution is how strong it is, even when the aggressive approaches are working. Too many Democrats remained cautious despite their win in 2006 using heavily populist and antiwar campaigns, and even when Bush's approval ratings and credibility had gone down the tubes. In 2007 and 2008, Democrats caved multiple times on war-related votes and on civil liberties; they lived in fear that a president with a 30 percent approval rating would call them soft on terrorism.
Although I regret that the Democrats haven't stood up to Bush more on security and civil liberties issues, and I think they could have easily survived politically if they had, there is at least a stronger argument for being politically careful on those issues -- voters are really scared of terrorism, and the message for Democrats on security issues is complicated. On domestic policy, though, Democrats have also failed to be strong advocates of dramatic new initiatives. The minimum wage and ethics initiatives they passed were solid achievements; forcing Bush to veto S-CHIP has been a worthy political fight to engage in, as was compelling him to veto legislation to withdraw troops from Iraq. The compromise energy bill that the Democrats passed and got Bush to sign had some respectable policy initiatives in it although it also had some poor ideas. But Democrats have failed to provoke major battles with Bush and the Republicans to illustrate how important their policy differences are.
Mike Lux is the author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be (Wiley, 2009), and is the co-founder and President of Progressive Strategies. Since starting the company, Mike has launched a number of important projects, including American Family Voices, an issue advocacy group working on pocketbook issues for American families; and the Progressive Donor Network, which works to coordinate a network of individual donors, issue advocacy groups, and top flight political consultants and strategists.
© 2009 Wiley All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/120236/

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Progressive Revolution: We Can't Afford to Play Small-Ball and Tip-Toe Around Right-Wingers Anymore

Image via Wikipedia

Alternet.org

The following is an excerpt from chapter 8 of Mike Lux's new book, "The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be" (Wiley, 2009). In this text, Lux argues that a "culture of caution" dominates Democratic politics in the modern era: "When you try something big and fail, even if the failure is due in great part to your own timidity, you only become more cautious. The failure of health-care reform made President Clinton more cautious, and he started playing small ball." As Obama's inauguration approaches, progressives and Democrats in Washington need to overcome their fears of proposing bold policies and stand up for the kind of America they believe in.
When Barack Obama based much of his 2008 Presidential campaign on the theme of hope, he certainly wasn't the first candidate to make that pitch. And when John McCain, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, during the years since 9/11, preached fear and more fear and nothing but fear, they weren't the first to do that, either. The entire history of American political debate can, in some sense, be described as the argument between the hope of progressives for a better future vs. the fear of conservatives who want to protect the way things are now.
In recent decades, neither party has been able to get a toehold as an enduring political majority. The Republicans' problem has been that they aggressively overreach, and then their rather extreme policy prescriptions just don't work. We get wars with no exit plans, side tax cuts that result in gigantic deficits, and voluntary goals for industry that never result in anything tangible happening.
For Democrats, the problem has been the opposite. They have been so beaten down by the conservative attack machine that they have allowed themselves to get into the habit of being cautious. When in power, they have had decent policy ideas that have produced pretty good results, but the results aren't substantial enough to make permanent changes or get voters excited about what Democrats are trying to accomplish. Since the tumultuous change decade of the 1960s and the ugly backlash that followed it, Democrats have often been too scared to think big about progressive change, and it has hurt them. ...
Fear and Conservatism
Fear has been a staple of every generation of conservatives .... Fear of the democratic mob. Fear of the freed slave. Fear of the liberated woman destroying the traditional family. Fear of freethinkers destroying religion. Fear of communism. Fear of gays and lesbians. Fear of hippies, "free love," and the drug culture. Fear of the immigrant. In a bizarre twist, Social Darwinism gave us fear of the weak, and in the modern version of Social Darwinism, Reagan gave us fear of the poor on welfare. Post-9/11, you can now add in the ever-potent fear of terrorism. Sadly, while some of those fears have faded with the passage of history, many remain with us, still powerful.
Many conservatives still fear feminism, sometimes to a hilarious degree. Here is one of my all-time favorite quotes, from the inimitable Pat Robertson: "[Feminism] is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
I had no idea feminism was so comprehensive, but there you have it. Of course, many men who are threatened by strong women aren't quite so hysterical, but like threatened people everywhere, they love to mock. Rush Limbaugh, who coined the feminazi, has this definition of feminism: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."
The prospect of empowered women isn't the only fear that conservatives have carried throughout the years of our nation's existence. They have always feared free thinking, which opens the door to a range of ideas and beliefs. The notion that their children might be exposed to any ideas or scientific theories that are different from what is being taught at home, as exemplified by the battles that are fought daily about public education, still scares conservatives a great deal. Read articles from any local newspaper about the nature of their resistance-to the teaching of evolution, the discussion of global warming, the assignment of certain books by English teachers, and so on-and you will see parents who are terrified that their own children might learn a way of thinking contrary to their own.
Fears of communism and welfare have faded somewhat in the last twenty years because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the passage of welfare reform, but they have been quickly replaced by conservatives' finding new things to scare voters with. Terrorism and immigrants have become the new hot-button excuses for pushing the political fear button. Or maybe I should amend that: terrorism, at least, is relatively new as a major fear for voters because until 9/11, people knew it could be a problem but didn't worry about it much. After 9/11, it became the biggest thing Americans were scared of. Immigration, on the other hand, is a very old fear that conservatives have been exploiting with renewed vigor in recent years.
In the early days of the United States, immigrants were generally quite welcome because the country had an ever expanding need for new workers, farmers, and pioneers to go out west. But by the 1850s, as more poor and working-class Irish journeyed across the Atlantic to settle here, the combination of anti-poor and anti-Catholic bigotry stirred up the vicious anti-immigrant movement called, appropriately enough, the Know-Nothings (the name came from the fact that their leaders swore an oath of secrecy about being involved in the movement, so that if asked about it, they said they knew nothing).
To join the organization of the original Know-Nothing movement, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, you had to be white and male, be born in the United States, and not only be Protestant but have no family connection whatsoever to Catholicism. The Know-Nothing political party, called the American Party, won nine gubernatorial seats and controlled at least one branch of the legislature in six states during the mid-1850s. It ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in the 1856 election, and he received about a quarter of the votes. But the movement quickly faded because the slavery issue soon overwhelmed everything else.
Throughout the late 1800s, another conservative period in U.S. history, immigration was regularly featured in the American political debate. Concerns about Chinese immigrants in California and Irish immigrants in the east were a constant refrain in the arguments against voting rights and civil rights. Sadly, even the populist movement was tainted by anti-immigrant rhetoric, as well as by its alliance with southern segregationists.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major restriction on immigration. Passed in 1882, it prohibited most immigration from Asia and took away the right of Chinese immigrants to become citizens. However, it was after World War I that anti-immigrant zeal truly reached its peak. Fearing a wave of postwar refugees and gripped by the conservative frenzy of the times, Congress passed legislation, in 1921 and 1924, that restricted immigration. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited European immigration to 3 percent of the total population of each European nationality living in the United States as of 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924 went much further, limiting European immigration to 2 percent of each nationality living in the United States as of 1890.
Just as conservatives do today, back then they also used people's fear of immigrants to attack other progressive ideas and legislation. Congressional opponents of the 14th and 15th amendments, for example, worried that immigrants would take advantage of these new voting rights. In the 1920s and earlier, immigrant bashers were anxious about what kinds of communists, socialists, and anarchists might be coming over to contaminate our population.
For example, a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily American printed the following editorial in April 1881:
Steamships are vomiting forth rotten cargoes of a thousand Chinese fortnightly, smitten and cursed with the plague of small-pox, and with other deadly plagues. The one-hundred thousand Chinese on this coast today, without family ties, with no elements of a prosperous immigration, the bronze locusts from Asia, plague-bearing[,] are eating out the substance which rightly belongs to the patrimony of the people.The single Chinese immigrant does, in this sense, usurp the place of a family. Trades and industries languish. The evils of Chinese immigration are upon us full force, aggregated by obstructions which originated with politicians who care more for some petty interest of party (the democratic party) than for the great and vital interests of the country.
If you think that was then and things have progressed, here are a couple of quotes from the current leadership of the anti immigration movement. The first comes from Congressman Virgil Goode of Virginia, who gained notoriety when he criticized Keith Ellison's choice to be sworn in using a copy of the Koran, rather than the Bible. Good warned his constituents, "If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office." He also had this to say about Hispanic immigration: "My message to them is, not in two weeks, not in two months, not in two years, never! We must be clear that we will not surrender America and we will not turn the United States over to the invaders from south of the border."
Another anti-immigration leader, Joseph Turner -- a staff member of the most powerful anti-immigration lobbying group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) -- recently said this in a letter to anti-immigration contributors: "Our enemies are bloodied and beaten. We cannot relent. Our boot is on their throat and we must have the willingness to crush their "throat" so that we can put our enemy down for good. The sovereignty of our nation and the future of our culture and civilization are at stake. The United States culture is man's salvation. If we perish, man perishes."
These statements were made in 2006 and 2007, not in some long-ago debate when social conventions and attitudes were different. And they were not the ravings of marginal crazies or rabid talk-show hosts; they were made by a senior member of the Republican caucus in Congress and by a leader of one of the biggest organizations working on the anti-immigration side of the aisle.
These are legitimate issues to debate in terms of immigration policy. Having better border security is a good thing, and we should be worried about corporations that try to exploit immigrant labor. But we can work those issues through and create a legitimate path to citizenship for immigrants without resorting to the fearmongering of the right wing.
Just as stopping the spread of totalitarian communism and keeping us safe from Soviet aggression during the Cold War were important objectives, today we need to deal with the real threat of terrorism. Many thoughtful suggestions, such as those generated by the Hart-Rudman commission and the 9/11 Commission, have been put forward. Important issues like securing the uranium from old Soviet weapons sites and keeping it away from the hands of terrorists, as well as safeguarding our own country's nuclear and chemical facilities to a greater degree, ought to be priorities for the U.S. government. What is fundamentally wrong, though, is turning the fear of terrorism into a political football, as Bush, Cheney, and other right-wingers have done.
Here's George W. Bush in 2004: "The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. That's what's at stake in this election."
And Dick Cheney: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again-that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."
Comparing a politician to Joe McCarthy is pretty strong stuff, but I find it hard to avoid the comparison when we live in a time when government officials spout the rhetoric I've just quoted. Using fear to justify virtually everything you want to do-from torture to absurd levels of government secrecy, to a war with no exit plan, to no-bid contracts for your biggest contributors, to violating the law and the constitution with warrantless wiretapping-is fundamentally wrong. Just as John Dean said that the Bush administration scandals have been the worst since Watergate, I'd be inclined to argue that Bush's and the Republicans' fearmongering over terrorism has been worse than McCarthy's fearmongering over Communism. ...
On my blog, OpenLeft.com, I have written about the timidity of Democrats in terms of both policy and politics. I call it the "culture of caution," a name I thought of in 2005 when my Democratic friends on Capitol Hill began to talk about the Republicans' culture of corruption. I liked that phrase and used it a lot myself in attacking the Republicans in 2005 and 2006, but I also thought, well, that is their problem, while ours is a culture of caution. ...
The Culture of Caution
In the culture of caution that dominates Democratic politics in the modern era, when you try something big and fail, even if the failure is due in great part to your own timidity, you only become more cautious. The failure of health-care reform made President Clinton more cautious, and he started playing small ball. President Clinton famously advocated support for things like school uniforms and agreed to support bad Republican bills on welfare reform and telecommunications reform. Clinton deserves credit for standing up to Republicans in the 1995 budget showdown, a decision that was the most important factor in his winning re-election, and for the other achievements I mentioned previously. For the most part, however, his last six years in office were a time of very modest policy ideas.
The culture of caution hurt the Democrats' political strategy as well. When the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment fight with the Republicans reared their ugly heads in 1998, I was working for the progressive group People for the American Way. We got heavily involved in opposing the impeachment and worked alongside the activists who eventually started MoveOn.org. We ran ads saying that it was time for the country to stop worrying about a sex scandal and "move on." Many Democratic politicians were horrified at those ads, convinced that by mentioning the issue we would just remind voters of what they didn't like about Clinton. We were asked by the party committees and the top members of Congress to pull them, but our focus groups had convinced us that we were right and should stand out ground. The message worked so well that candidates running in competitive races started to use the message in the ads, and, eventually, even the party committees did as well. Democrats picked up five seats in the 1998 elections and thereby stunned the pundits of conventional wisdom, who had widely predicted Democratic losses of thirty seats or more in Congress. It was the best showing for the party of a president in his sixth year in office in history since 1822, when James Monroe essentially had no opposition party. But Democrats would likely have won control of Congress if the Democratic establishment had not been so cautious for so long about facing the impeachment issue.
When Bush took over and exhibited an aggressive form of ideological partisanship never before seen in modern history, Democrats sometimes stood up to him, but all too frequently, they rolled over. This was especially true on national security and civil liberties issues after 9/11.
In 2002, when the authorization vote on the Iraq War came up, I was told in confidence by a top aide to Dick Gephardt that if Democrats would cut a deal with Bush on the war, the issue would go away and Democrats would win the 2002 election on domestic issues. That same cycle, I was told by a top pollster for the party committees that Democrats should just avoid talking about national security altogether because it wasn't our strongest issue.
Of course, this strategy didn't work out so well, as Democrats went down to an ugly defeat in the 2002 election, where security issues dominated. In fact, Gephardt's strategy of cutting a deal with Bush was a political disaster. Progressive antiwar Democrats were divided and discouraged, and the Republicans attacked the Democrats just as hard as they would have otherwise on national security. The deal also played out poorly in the 2004 elections because John Kerry could never quite explain why he had voted for the war, even though he later said that he opposed it.
The most aggravating thing about the Democratic culture of caution is how strong it is, even when the aggressive approaches are working. Too many Democrats remained cautious despite their win in 2006 using heavily populist and antiwar campaigns, and even when Bush's approval ratings and credibility had gone down the tubes. In 2007 and 2008, Democrats caved multiple times on war-related votes and on civil liberties; they lived in fear that a president with a 30 percent approval rating would call them soft on terrorism.
Although I regret that the Democrats haven't stood up to Bush more on security and civil liberties issues, and I think they could have easily survived politically if they had, there is at least a stronger argument for being politically careful on those issues -- voters are really scared of terrorism, and the message for Democrats on security issues is complicated. On domestic policy, though, Democrats have also failed to be strong advocates of dramatic new initiatives. The minimum wage and ethics initiatives they passed were solid achievements; forcing Bush to veto S-CHIP has been a worthy political fight to engage in, as was compelling him to veto legislation to withdraw troops from Iraq. The compromise energy bill that the Democrats passed and got Bush to sign had some respectable policy initiatives in it although it also had some poor ideas. But Democrats have failed to provoke major battles with Bush and the Republicans to illustrate how important their policy differences are.
Mike Lux is the author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be (Wiley, 2009), and is the co-founder and President of Progressive Strategies. Since starting the company, Mike has launched a number of important projects, including American Family Voices, an issue advocacy group working on pocketbook issues for American families; and the Progressive Donor Network, which works to coordinate a network of individual donors, issue advocacy groups, and top flight political consultants and strategists.
© 2009 Wiley All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/120236/

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Be your brother's keeper, President-elect Barack Obama urges

NY Daily Times

President-elect Barack Obama encouraged Americans on Wednesday to embrace the holiday spirit and be "my brother's keeper" during these trying economic times.
"As we count the higher blessings of faith and family, we know that millions of Americans don't have a job. Many more are struggling to pay the bills or stay in their homes. From students to seniors, the future seems uncertain," Obama said in a Christmas greeting from Hawaii, where he's vacationing.
"This season of giving should also be a time to renew a sense of common purpose and shared citizenship. Now, more than ever, we must rededicate ourselves to the notion that we share a common destiny as Americans - that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper."
While Obama, his wife and two young daughters enjoyed a final family retreat before they move to the White House next month, President Bush and his wife, Laura, huddled for a last Texican-style holiday at Camp David. Enchiladas and tamales were on the Christmas Eve menu, and the traditional turkey and trimmings will top today's Christmas table.
They'll head to their Crawford, Tex., ranch tomorrow and return New Year's Day with 20 days left in his administration.
Bush also made traditional Christmas calls to nine servicemen and women around the world, including Army Spec. Marcus Brown, 23, of Staten Island, who was awarded the Bronze Star for wounds suffered April 30 in Iraq.
"He said the President was 'very bubbly.' He told him he was doing a good job, and keep up the good work and to thank him for putting himself out the way he did to win the Bronze [Star] Medal," said his mom, Michele Brown, 52, who works in customer service for JPMorgan Chase.
She said a third Christmas without her son is tough, but she crowed: "I'm so proud of him. I taught him the right way, not to be selfish. The Army taught him to be selfless."
Obama also urged Americans to keep the the 174,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in their thoughts. "This holiday season, their families celebrate with a joy that is muted knowing that a loved one is absent and sometimes in danger," he said.

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Be your brother's keeper, President-elect Barack Obama urges

NY Daily Times

President-elect Barack Obama encouraged Americans on Wednesday to embrace the holiday spirit and be "my brother's keeper" during these trying economic times.
"As we count the higher blessings of faith and family, we know that millions of Americans don't have a job. Many more are struggling to pay the bills or stay in their homes. From students to seniors, the future seems uncertain," Obama said in a Christmas greeting from Hawaii, where he's vacationing.
"This season of giving should also be a time to renew a sense of common purpose and shared citizenship. Now, more than ever, we must rededicate ourselves to the notion that we share a common destiny as Americans - that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper."
While Obama, his wife and two young daughters enjoyed a final family retreat before they move to the White House next month, President Bush and his wife, Laura, huddled for a last Texican-style holiday at Camp David. Enchiladas and tamales were on the Christmas Eve menu, and the traditional turkey and trimmings will top today's Christmas table.
They'll head to their Crawford, Tex., ranch tomorrow and return New Year's Day with 20 days left in his administration.
Bush also made traditional Christmas calls to nine servicemen and women around the world, including Army Spec. Marcus Brown, 23, of Staten Island, who was awarded the Bronze Star for wounds suffered April 30 in Iraq.
"He said the President was 'very bubbly.' He told him he was doing a good job, and keep up the good work and to thank him for putting himself out the way he did to win the Bronze [Star] Medal," said his mom, Michele Brown, 52, who works in customer service for JPMorgan Chase.
She said a third Christmas without her son is tough, but she crowed: "I'm so proud of him. I taught him the right way, not to be selfish. The Army taught him to be selfless."
Obama also urged Americans to keep the the 174,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in their thoughts. "This holiday season, their families celebrate with a joy that is muted knowing that a loved one is absent and sometimes in danger," he said.

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McCain to Attack Obama for Public Radio Comments from 2001

Image via Wikipedia

This is typical McCain. He's going to try to make hay on an out of context comment that Obama made in 2001. Actually, Obama here acknowledges a conservative belief that change shouldn't come from the courts, but from the community. He says he agrees with McCain. McCain plays to the ignorant. Or maybe HE is the ignorant, doesn't understand the theoretical constitutional legal argument!
Political Punch

On September 6, 2001, then-state senator Barack Obama appeared on a public radio chat show to discuss "Slavery and the Constitution." You can listen to the whole show HERE.
In that show -- WBEZ-FM's "Odyssey" -- Obama discussed the role of the courts in civil rights.
Today, aides say, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will seize on some of those remarks, as hyped by Mr. Drudge.
Obama in that interview said, "If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I'd be okay."
"But," Obama said, "The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it's been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn't shifted."
Obama said "one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still stuffer from that."
A caller, "Karen," asked if it's "too late for that kind of reparative work economically?" And she asked if that work should be done through the courts or through legislation.
"Maybe I'm showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor," Obama said. "I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn't structured that way."
Presumably McCain will go after Obama in ways some on the conservative bloggosphere are today, accusing Obama of calling it a "tragedy" for not venturing into "the issues of redistribution of wealth" -- though Obama's campaign says that's a twisting of his words.
"In this interview back in 2001, Obama was talking about the civil rights movement - and the kind of work that has to be done on the ground to make sure that everyone can live out the promise of equality," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton says. "Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Obama's economic plan or his plan to give the middle class a tax cut. It's just another distraction from an increasingly desperate McCain campaign."
Burton continues: "In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of 'redistributing' wealth. Obama's point - and what he called a tragedy - was that legal victories in the Civil Rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country.
"As Obama has said before and written about, he believes that change comes from the bottom up - not from the corridors of Washington," Burton says. "He worked in struggling communities to improve the economic situation of people on the South Side of Chicago, who lost their jobs when the steel plants closed. And he's worked as a legislator to provide tax relief and health care to middle-class families. And so Obama's point was simply that if we want to improve economic conditions for people in this country, we should do so by bringing people together at the community level and getting everyone involved in our democratic process."
-- jpt

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Something is Wrong with Our Justice System

There is something wrong with our justice system. Michael Vick gets 23 months in prison Monday for his role in a dogfighting conspiracy, and Barry Bonds faces a 30 year in prison term if convicted for lying to a grand jury about steroid use.
The US has the highest rate of imprisonment of any country in the world, 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). One in 32 Americans are in jail or prison. Too many are young African Americans and way too many are imprisoned for petty drug offenses. Not only are we creating more victims, we're ensuring their future success as criminals in the best training grounds (prisons). We can no longer afford this sick system, by taxes, or moral responsibility.

The Get-Tough-On-Crime Bug is Making Us Sick

AlterNet

Doctors recommend people get the flu shot this time of year. And I recommend folks get inoculated for the get-tough-on-crime bug before the campaign season gets in full swing. The highly contagious mental malady prevents people from thinking clearly about crime and punishment. It's how we get legislation like the "Aid Elimination Penalty" provision in the Higher Education Act (HEA) that bars students with drug convictions from receiving federal financial aid for college; apparently, to teach them a lesson.


By "them," in this case, we're talking about disproportionately disadvantaged students. Rich, stoner kids don't need financial aid.


The push to repeal the provision from the HEA was dropped in Congress two weeks ago, despite the efforts of the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform, though they did get one small victory in getting the law amended so that the AEP applies only to offenses committed while a student is getting financial aid.


Still, an estimated 200,000 students have been denied financial aid because of AEP, as Congress moves toward reauthorizing the bill, AEP and all. It's just one of the many strains of the get-tough-on-crime virus that attacks the popular political mind, re-defining "justice" as an institutionalized form of making sure "those" people get what they "deserve."


In his 1966 study of the American penal system, Dr. Karl Menninger discerned a diagnosis, offering two simple observations that exposes the get-tough-on-crime approach for what it is: an irrelevant distraction in dealing with the "crime problem."


First, Menninger observed, most criminals are never caught, meaning: convicted criminals -- the people in prison -- are only the minority of law-breakers foolish enough, brazen enough, poor enough or unlucky enough to get caught.


And, of the minority of offenders who are behind bars, not even all of them are guilty, as we are reminded with alarming frequency by periodic news reports of yet another wrongly convicted inmate later exonerated by DNA evidence. It was true in 1966 when Menninger wrote The Crime of Punishment and it's true today. According to the most recent figures I could find -- the FBI's 2002 Crime Index Offenses Cleared data -- law enforcement agencies, nationwide, had a 20 percent clearance rate for all crimes.


[..]Secondly, and more importantly, Menninger reminds us, most convicted criminals will eventually be released. If we remove law-breakers from society to merely punish and humiliate them for their crimes because they "deserve it," and then release them as economic and political pariahs, by doing stuff like denying drug offenders financial aid for college, the only thing we've done is warehouse workers in labor camps that double as crime universities where penitentiary professors teach their pupils the tricks-of-the-trade.


Arguing about whether the criminal justice system should be about retribution or rehabilitation is besides the point. Because it won't change the reality that if you put people with problems in a place that makes them worse-off and then turn them loose on society without any resources, the only thing you've done is exponentially increase the chances of that person becoming a repeat offender, guaranteeing many more future victims.


Menninger's medicine goes right to the heart of the get-tough-on-crime rationalization: "'Doesn't anybody care about the victims?' cry some demagogues, with melodramatic flourishes. 'Why should all this attention be given to the criminals and none to those they have beaten or robbed?'"


"This childish outcry has an appeal for the unthinking. Of course no victim should be neglected. But the individual victim has no more right to be protected than those of us who may become victims. We all want to be better protected. And we are not being protected by a system that attacks 'criminals' as if they were the embodiment of evil."


Until the "crime problem" is diagnosed and treated as a "social safety problem," like Menninger suggested, we'll keep having these get-tough-on-crime policies creating more future victims. Inoculate yourself.

Marijuana Laws Cost Taxpayers $41.8 Billion Per Year

Marijuana Policy Project

Marijuana prohibition costs taxpayers $41.8 billion every year in law enforcement expenses and revenues lost to government at all levels, according to a new report released today.


The analysis, by researcher Jon B. Gettman, who has a doctorate in public policy and specializes in economic development, is based primarily on government estimates of the U.S. marijuana supply, prices, and arrests. Gettman made international headlines in December 2006 with an analysis showing marijuana to be the top cash crop in the U.S. The full report, "Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws," which uses different methodology than previous analyses of the costs of marijuana prohibition, is available at www.drugscience.org/bcr/index.html .


"This report documents a massive waste of taxpayer dollars in pursuit of eradicating a government-forbidden plant, and the financial waste hit all-time high levels last year, as the FBI just reported there were a record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Prohibition has done nothing to reduce marijuana use, which remains at about the level it's been for decades, but prohibition has created a massive underground economy that's completely unregulated and untaxed. The parallels with Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s, including the needless violence and a huge underground economy, are eerie."


Key findings from Gettman's report include:


**Marijuana arrests constitute 5.54 percent of all U.S. arrests, costing taxpayers $10.7 billion.


**The total U.S. marijuana supply is 14,349 metric tons annually, with a retail value of $113 billion.


**Marijuana prohibition diverts the entire $113 billion in sales from the legal, taxed economy. Based on the White House Office of Management and Budget's estimate that 28.7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product goes to federal, local, and state governments as tax revenue, marijuana prohibition costs $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues annually.

Personal vs Collective Self-Interest

How to Save the World
But Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki, who went to such pains to explain in his book the need for a surveyed 'crowd' to be objective and independent of 'groupthink' (if their collective perspectives are to be truly wise), points out in this week's New Yorker that the self-interest of individuals, taken collectively, can be very different from the collective self-interest of the group as a whole.
As an example he notes that, in a market 'undistorted' by regulation, people choose to buy large, gas-gulping, clumsy vehicles (SUVs and light trucks) -- because they (mistakenly, as Malcolm Gladwell points out) believe they are safer, that if your car is bigger and heavier than the other guy's, in an accident you will fare better. But when asked if they would favour regulations that ban such vehicles, they overwhelmingly say yes.
Another example that was reported recently is that, while the majority of business owners want less social and environmental regulation of their industry (because they think it puts them at a competitive disadvantage versus countries that lack such regulation), an overwhelming number would not only support, but would actually prefer, strong social and environmental regulations on business provided they were across-the-board (affecting every competitor equitably) and rigorously enforced.
We can see examples of this everywhere. The expressed self-interest of individual buyers in the absence of regulation is very different from their acknowledged collective self-interest in an equitably regulated environment. It's not regulation we hate -- in our modern crowded society we could not live without regulation (sorry, libertarians, though I like the idea); it's inequitable regulation, and regulation that is clearly arbitrary and not in the collective self-interest, that we are opposed to.
And because of our (often deliberately fostered) skepticism about the competence of government to do anything effectively (and about its honesty), we tend to believe that all regulations will necessarily be inequitable and 'selectively applied'.
So given that skepticism, we tend to prefer to pursue our (unregulated) personal self-interest, and shrug off the fact that our collective self-interest would be better served if that personal self-interest were restricted, and altered, by effective, honest regulation.
Unequivocably anti-regulation forces (the corporatists) prey off this skepticism, playing us off against each other, and profiting from the inequities and the selective application and non-enforcement of regulations. And laugh all the way to the bank.
Bush's orders to regulators not to enforce the law, and to dismantle regulations, have therefore gone largely unchallenged, except by a few brave whistle-blowers, who promptly lost their jobs.
The bottom line is that we need to restore integrity to government, and restore authority to regulators to uphold and enforce regulations equitably and not arbitrarily, before we have any hope of persuading citizens to vote for their collective self-interest over their personal self-interest.
We're smart enough to know that the collective self-interest is better for all of us. The question is whether we're smart enough and committed enough to fix the shattered hulk of dismantled, corrupted North American governments (I can't speak for Europe's governments, though I sense that regulations there are stronger and more or less intact), so that they can make regulation work effectively again in our collective self-interest.

From digital divide to social empowerment

V Ramaswamy
Looking at the socio-economic picture of India, it is clear that there is a large segment of our people who are entirely outside of the IT revolution. The existing social structure ensures that such people live out their lives without any access to the technology, its instruments, its education. Existing socio-economic disparities are magnified, as the new technology is embraced by those with access to good education, exposure and social confidence, skills, capital etc. This has given rise to the term "digital divide". The term suggests that the world shall henceforth comprise of those who are part of the digital revolution, and those who are left out of this. The former would have a stake in the emerging future, while the latter are consigned to a sub-human status.
One section is entering the post-digital age, in terms of cognitive development, while the other languishes in the pre-literate era. Increasingly, the common space binding together our people in a shared world - is vanishing.
The response
There could be two kinds of response to this situation.
The first, a normative one, an idealistic view, calling for social justice, equity, opportunity etc. Actually, this is not simply idealistic, but also quite realistic. No one thinks very much about the pernicious effect of socio-economic disparities, and the social instability, violence etc that results. Since we do ultimately coexist in the same geographical space, in the long run effects do catch up with causes.
The second approach, is a more practical one. This looks at the distorted nature of the IT sector in India and advocates a drastic reorganisation. In a manner that breaks the nexus between social structure and technology access. Where technology access becomes the means to change the social structure.
The application of the technology and its impact is determined by the existing social structure. However, the same technology may also be subversive of the existing structure.
Mass computing
Notwithstanding the growth of PC use in India over the last decade and more, this is still something touching a miniscule part of the country's people or economic activities. While improvements have definitely taken place, in terms of electrification and spread of the telephone and television network, there still remains the immense metro / urban - rural gap in infrastructure.
Even within this dichotomy, there is a further dichotomy. No one looks at computing in the context of the whole spectrum of economic activities - especially on the humbler side. Even as computer-use grows, computing as such remains a casualty. But the scope for mass computing, as applied to diverse professions and activities, including many humble ones, remains an untapped field. This calls for greater communication with users and customer-specific applications and solutions. Most significantly, it calls for marketing strategies that break the socially defined barriers of communication. Even within metro cities, PC vendors do not think of selling to modest retail outlets, small businesses, run by unsophisticated people who do not belong to the English-medium domain. But in its own interest, the IT sector has to break out of this syndrome.
This is something that could well be a means to enhance livelihood, employment, enterprise, productivity, efficiency and profit. Most fundamentally, it could bring dignity to the down-trodden.
Looking at the technology itself, and its applications, it is clear that this could actually be a powerful means for positive change, in the direction of empowerment of the poor. But for this potential to be realised, and over a mass scale, a number of major steps have to be taken. These would go against the grain of the predominant orientation of the computers-related industry.
This then poses a tremendous challenge, to the whole field of information technology, as well as to social thinkers and planners. The longer this challenge is ignored, the deeper and more immutable the digital divide.
There have been a number of visionary experiments and small-scale efforts along these lines, internationally as well as in India. These have only affirmed the revolutionary empowering potential of the computer. But there is now a need to move from the stage of small experiments to actions at a mass scale. Programmes of socio-economic empowerment have also to be integrated with "digital empowerment ".
Recycling hardware
Keeping the focus on real computing applications (rather than machines to sell), in a real user context, will necessarily mean that a whole new operation has to be established. To make available affordable computing hardware and software, which will significantly empower a range of economic actors who are presently outside the purview of IT.
Where do the old machines go? In a poor country like India, which is capital scarce, can we afford to waste the valuable social capital that usable computing hardware represents? Recycling hardware, within an approach of developing and presenting use-focused computing applications, is a key challenge.
A match has to be made - between potential users of computing, and computing equipment. This calls for people, information and capital.
Computer education
Once again, if one keeps the entire society in view, then there is not much to be said about computer education in India. Illiteracy, school drop-outs, school and university graduates who are unemployable for all practical purposes - all this casts a very dark shadow. What is the way out?
How long does it take to bridge the chasm between illiteracy, or limited education, and computer-literacy? What are the cognitive foundations of computer application? Most significantly, how can one somehow bring about access and exposure to computers for the deprived?
Even today, the commonest "social welfare" intervention in urban slum areas is to impart tailoring skills to poor women and provide them with sewing machines. But could one imagine imparting basic computer education to some of these very women, and distributing recycled PCs, with which a range of home or workplace-based data-entry, processing, storage, communications, service and web-related operations can be undertaken?
Can one conceive of huge databases, all valuable to specific users, that are maintained by neo-literates? Consider the employment generated in hardware assembly and maintenance, customer relations, software adaptation.
Can one envision computer-based networks spreading through the interstices of the city, binding together deprived people in a movement for empowerment?
All bringing income, dignity, and parity with the emerging world?
Thus a second major area of challenge is mass computer education. In turn, this presumes the recycling operation.
Institutional infrastructure
When one talks about any kind of change, one should think about the ownership of this process. Who is responsible? This leads us to the third, and perhaps most crucial link of the chain: grassroot-level institutions.
We need to build institutions and institutional capabilities, to work with IT, among the deprived sections. In urban slum neighbourhoods for instance. Not self-serving institutions, but institutions which act as resource units and catalysts for empowerment of large numbers of humble citizens. Institutions which will work, patiently, and with vision, amidst difficult conditions, and nurture a generation of post-digital divide learners and workers.
Can the socially enlightened application of technology be used as a powerful means for the substantive empowerment of the weaker sections, and thus bring to life and vitality the whole social fabric of the nation?