Awesome Quotes: Dennis Kucinich

From a 2007 Democratic Party Presidential Debate...

Wolf Blitzer: Congressman Kucinich, I believe you're the only person on this stage who had a chance to vote on the Patriot Act right after 9/11 who voted against it right away.

Dennis Kucinich: That's because I read it.

Pentagon Gives Dennis Kucinich Runaround

From FireDogLake.com:
Last we heard of Dennis Kucinich’s request to visit Bradley Manning, the Pentagon had spent a full month referring his request from one official to another rather than respond to his request.

On February 4, Dennis Kucinich asked DOD to allow him to visit Bradley Manning so he could assess his conditions of confinement. On February 8, Robert Gates wrote Kucinich a short note telling him we was referring his request to Secretary of the Army, John McHugh. In a letter dated February 24–but apparently not received in Kucinich’s office until March 1–McHugh told Kucinich he was referring his request to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.

In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing...

DOD Continues to Stall on Kucinich’s Request to Visit Bradley Manning
emptywheel
Monday March 14, 2011
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/14/dod-continues-to-stall-on-kucinichs-request-to-visit-bradley-manning/

Progressive Libertarians

Ralph Nader was once the most despised man in korporate America for his muckraking. He has since become despised by the yuppie liberal media mouthpieces who use him as a scapegoat for the 2000 election. (Antonin Scalia or Jeb Bush would be better choices.) Whatever his flaws, he is his own man and a trendsetter, and thus his recent embrace of the fusion politics of progressives and libertarians may hopefully be a sign of where things could be heading.

Think of it as the best of both Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. As trend researcher Gerald Celente described it, movement members would be "libertarian in the sense of government staying out of people's lives" and progressive "with the government having control of issues where they can make a difference." Nader declares this to be "the most exciting new political dynamic."

Nader: Progressive-libertarian alliance ‘the most exciting new political dynamic’ in US
Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, January 13th, 2011
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/progressive-libertarianism-the-exciting-political-dynamic-ralph-nader

Orwell in charge?

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0820/george-orwell/

Orwell in charge? Kucinich compares Iraq ‘exit’ to Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’
Ron Brynaert
Friday, August 20th, 2010

"Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today challenged the notion that removing ‘combat brigades’ but leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq constitutes an end to combat operations, let alone an end to the war," a press release sent to RAW STORY on Thursday stated.

The press release continues:

“Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said ' Mission Accomplished ' . In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq , but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities.

“Just seven days ago, General Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander of Iraq ’s military, said that Iraq ’s security forces will not be trained and ready to take over security for another 10 years. One story is being told to the military on the ground in Iraq and another story is being told to their families back home.

“You can’t be in and out at the same time.

“This is not the end of the war; this is simply a new stage in the campaign to lull the American people into accepting an open-ended presence in Iraq . This is not an honest accounting to the American people and it diminishes the role of the troops who will put their lives on the line. This is not fair to the troops, their families or the American people.

“The Administration and the Pentagon would be wise to level with the American people about our long-term commitment to Iraq .

“The cost of the wars has been estimated to be around $1 million per soldier per year. Each year the troop levels stay at 50,000 means another $50 billion is wasted. I object to spending billions of dollars to maintain a charade in Iraq while our own economy is failing and over 15 million Americans are out of work. I object to keeping any level troops in Iraq to maintain a war based on lies. It is time that Congress sees through the manipulation and finally acts to truly end the war by stopping its funding,” said Kucinich.

Kucinich's statement doesn't mention President Obama's name once, but the president also didn't don a military jumpsuit and fly a plane onto a carrier with a gigantic "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Many of the top liberal blogs who have criticized Obama the past year went silent on the Iraq "exit" coverage (perhaps some are on August vacation).

Aside from Kucinich, RAW STORY was only able to find a scathing editorial on the World Socialist Web Site:

The White House and the Pentagon, assisted by a servile media, have hyped Thursday’s exit of a single Stryker brigade from Iraq as the end of the “combat mission” in that country, echoing the ill-fated claim made by George W. Bush seven years ago.

Obama is more skillful in packaging false propaganda than Bush, and no doubt has learned something from the glaring mistakes of his predecessor. Bush landed on the deck of the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 to proclaim—under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”—that “major combat operations” in Iraq were over. A captive audience of naval enlisted personnel was assembled on deck as cheering extras.

Obama wisely did not fly to Kuwait to deliver a similar address from atop an armored vehicle. He merely issued a statement from the White House, while leaving the heavy lifting to the television networks and their “embedded” reporters, who accompanied the brigade across the border into Kuwait and repeated the propaganda line fashioned by the administration and the military brass.


Three years after former President George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on an aircraft carrier, MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann proceeded to mock the early propagandistic call by announcing each successive night on his Countdown show that it has been "one thousand and blank" days since the the war in Iraq "ended," RAW STORY noted yesterday.

Chances are, three years from now, even if US troops are still caught up in a quagmire in Iraq, Olbermann won't be doing a similar signoff schtick to mock the coverage that ran on NBC and MSNBC Wednesday evening.

At The New York Times Media Decoder blog,, Brian Stelter reported, "The combat mission in Iraq doesn’t officially end until Aug. 31 but viewers and readers could be forgiven for thinking it ended tonight."

In a broadcast that Brian Williams said constituted an “official Pentagon announcement,” NBC showed live pictures Wednesday night as members of the last combat brigade in Iraq drove toward the Kuwait border, symbolizing an end to fighting in the country.

“We are with the last combat troops” in Iraq, the NBC correspondent Richard Engel said at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, the same time that the military lifted an embargo that had been placed on the reporters traveling with the 440 troops, a part of the 4/2 Stryker Brigade.

The Associated Press, Fox News, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and other news media outlets also reported Wednesday evening that the last combat troops were crossing into Kuwait. Only NBC broadcast it live, in asymmetrical image to the invasion that captured the nation’s attention on television seven years ago.

Coverage by most media outlets on the "last combat brigade" leaving Iraq paint an almost rosy picture with their headlines, which suggest that not only will the close to 60,000 troops left behind not be fighting anyone, but that there is no chance of any future surge.

"As the United States military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void," the New York Times reports.

However, the Associated Press and many liberal blogs instead chose to criticize Fox News for not covering the "exit" with the same gusto.

Perhaps another network could have covered the extensive coverage MSNBC was provided by the Pentagon instead.

Has Rahm's assumption about progressives been vindicated?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/18/progressives/index.html

Thursday, Mar 18, 2010
Has Rahm's assumption about progressives been vindicated?
By Glenn Greenwald

Politico's Ben Smith yesterday suggested that one important aspect of Rahm Emanuel's health care strategy -- to ignore the demands of progressives on the ground that they would fall into line at the end no matter what -- has been vindicated. Smith points to a new poll showing near-unanimous support for the bill among liberals as well as the fact that not a single progressive member of the House (not even Dennis Kucinich) will oppose this bill even though the prime progressive objections were ignored. Smith's argument unsurprisingly provoked immediate objections from numerous progressives -- Paul Krugman, Markos Moultisas, Chris Bowers -- who argue that in the wake of Scott Brown's election, Emanuel advocated a drastically scaled-back version of health care reform because he believed the original, larger version couldn't pass. If (as looks highly likely) the current bill passes, then, they argue, Emanuel will have been proven wrong -- not vindicated.

Assuming that Emanuel really advocated for a scaled-back version (that's from anonymous royal court intrigue reports, so who knows?), this objection (as Smith acknowledges) is true as far as it goes -- but it doesn't go very far at all, because it doesn't really have anything to do with Smith's "vindication" argument. The "vindication" Smith sees has nothing to do with Emanuel's advocacy for a "scaled-back" bill, but is about a different point entirely: namely, Emanuel's assumption that there was absolutely no reason to accommodate progressive objections to the health care bill because progressives (despite their threats) would automatically fall into line and support whatever the White House wanted, even if their demands were ignored. Is there really any doubt that Emanuel was right about this point? Indeed, Markos himself essentially acknowledged these progressive failures last night on MSNBC.

For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed -- publicly and unequivocally -- that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option. They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge. Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders -- such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others -- were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated. But now? All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do -- vote for a health care bill with no public option -- and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so. In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen -- ignore the progressives, we don't need to give them anything because they'll get into line -- is exactly what happened. How is that not vindication?

Just consider what Nate Silver wrote yesterday in trying to understand why progressives have suddenly united behind this bill, in a post he entitled "Why Liberals (Suddenly) Love the Health Care Bill":

It has occurred in spite of the fact that the bill hasn't really gotten any more liberal. Whatever might come out of the reconciliation process will be marginally more liberal than what the Senate passed on its own, but still lacks a public option or a Medicare buy-in, and suffers from most of the same flaws that some liberals were critiquing in the first place. It might have helped a little bit to get the Senate bill off the front pages -- but the differences between the "Obama"/reconciliation bill and the Senate's December bill are fairly cosmetic.


In other words, the bill which many progressives were swearing just a couple months ago they could not and would not support (the Senate bill) is materially similar to the bill they're now vigorously supporting (the Obama/reconciliation bill). The differences are purely "cosmetic," as Silver says (it's even worse than that, since one of the few positive changes progressives could point to -- the Health Insurance Rate Authority, which would prevent large premium increases -- was just removed from the bill). Thus, from a purely strategic perspective, Emanuel was absolutely right not to take progressives seriously because he knew they would do exactly what they did: support the bill even if their demands were ignored.

I want to be clear here: I'm not criticizing progressives who support this bill, nor am I criticizing those who insisted they would oppose it but changed their minds at the end. Unlike many progressives, I was never among those who advocated for this bill's defeat because, as loathsome and even dangerous as I find the bill's corporatist framework to be (mandating that citizens buy the products of the private health insurance industry), I've found it very difficult (as I said all along) to oppose a bill that results in greater health care coverage for millions of currently uninsured people. Whether progressives are doing the right thing in supporting this bill is debatable (there's a strong progressive case for the bill -- any bill that restricts industry abuses and vastly expands coverage is inherently progressive -- and a strong progressive case that it does more harm than good), but that's a completely separate question from the one raised by Smith.

What's not debatable is that this process highlighted -- and worsened -- the virtually complete powerlessness of the Left and progressives generally in Washington. If you were in Washington negotiating a bill, would you take seriously the threats of progressive House members in the future that they will withhold support for a Party-endorsed bill if their demands for improvements are not met? Of course not. No rational person would.

Moreover, everyone who has ever been involved in negotiations knows that those who did what most progressive DC pundits did here from the start -- namely, announce: we have certain things we'd like you to change in this bill, but we'll go along with this even if you give us nothing -- are making themselves completely irrelevant in the negotiating progress. People who signal in advance that they will accept a deal even if all of their demands are rejected will always be completely impotent, for reasons too obvious to explain. The loyal, Obama-revering pundits who acted as the bill's mindless cheerleaders from the start (this is the greatest achievement since FDR walked the Earth) were always going to be ignored; why would anyone listen to the demands of those doing nothing but waving pom-poms?

By contrast, progressives who originally threatened to oppose the bill unless their demands were met (such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Jane Hamsher, the Progressive House Caucus) absolutely did the right thing: that's the only way to wield power and to have one's demands be heard. And there's nothing necessarily wrong as a negotiating strategy with ultimately backing down from one's threats: it's normal and often effective in negotiations to insist that one won't accept a deal without X, Y and Z only, at the end, to accept a deal lacking some or even all of those elements on the ground that the deal on the table is the best one will ever get, and it's preferable to having no deal. The problem here is two-fold: (1) nobody (certainly not Emanuel) ever took the progressive threat seriously -- because nobody believed they would really oppose the bill even if they got nothing -- and it thus had no credibility and they were ignored; and worse: (2) nobody will ever, ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future, because they know that progressives will do what they did here: namely, get in line at the end and support what the Party wants even if none of their desired changes to a bill are made.

Talk Left's Armando, who is a long-time litigator and thus deals with these negotiation dynamics every day, has been making this point for months, and made a very insightful comment yesterday about all of this. He quoted Nate Silver pointing out that "at least five different parties effectively have veto power over the process, including the White House, the Blue Dogs (who cast the decisive votes in both chambers of Congress), and both the Floor and Committee Leadership," and then explained:

And there you have the progressive failure in political bargaining in a nutshell - no one EVER believed that progressive had veto power, or more accurately, no one ever believed progressives would ever EXERCISE veto power. That the progressives would be rolled was a given. Obviously that was an accurate view of the reality. . . .

Silver can not imagine a progressive bargaining position that threatened the passage of the health bills. No one could imagine it, even progressives. Until they can not only imagine it, but in fact project it in a political negotiation, progressives will remain irrelevant outside of Democratic primaries, when they will receive a plethora of campaign promises sure to be abandoned by pols. Cuz that is what pols do.

I think there is actually a counter example that anyone interested in bargaining can look to for a better result - the unions and the excise tax. The unions were willing to "kill the bill" unless they received major concessions on the excise tax issue. The White House wanted an excise tax and serious and tough negotiations ensued, with the unions gaining major concessions.

The only reason why the unions were able to garner those concessions was because they were willing to, and were perceived as willing to, "kill the bill." They knew Obama wanted this health bill more than they did and that Obama would find a way to accommodate the unions' concerns on the excise tax.

The unions took the risk of killing the bill and were rewarded with major concessions on their key issue. That is how bargaining works.

This has been going on forever, far beyond the health care process. After all, aside from contempt for the establishment media, the single greatest fuel for the rise of the liberal blogosphere was contempt for the Democratic Party's corporatism -- i.e., the fact that progressives had no influence within the Party, and Party leaders, TNR-style, spent far more energy scorning the Left than the Republicans. That's what is somewhat ironic about the blogosphere's almost-unanimous support for this health care bill (as well as their increasingly rabid, TNR-style demonization campaign against the handful of people on the Left who actually stuck to their guns and who are thus now viewed as worse than Pol Pot): namely, even if supporting the bill is the right thing to do, this conduct has reinforced and strengthened the powerlessness of progressives, i.e., the very problem the blogosphere was devoted to subverting. There's a reason why so many progressive Beltway bloggers now turn to the war-supporting, Lieberman-loving, Left-bashing Jonathan Chait as the guide for what All Good Progressives do and think; that's the model that's being strengthened here.

Amazingly, one now finds posts on the front page of Daily Kos (not by Markos) demanding that progressives repeat this behavior on every bill in the future: "whatever that final position is, it will then be the job of the progressive to evaluate it strictly on the merits of what it is, rather than what it could have been. And if what it is, is even incrementally better than what we have right now, then it should be supported." That sounds exactly like the rationale of capitulating Democratic officials of the last two decades, not what the blogosphere was ostensibly devoted to promoting. Why would anyone in Washington -- surrounded by powerful lobbyists and people whose threats are actually credible -- ever take seriously or listen to a person who thinks and behaves this way (I'll support anything you want even if you ignore me, as long as I get a single crumb), and even proudly announces it in advance? They never would listen to such a person -- and they don't -- because that's the sure path to self-imposed irrelevance.

Again, whether progressives are doing the right thing by changing their minds and supporting the health care bill is a separate question from the one I'm discussing here. I never argued for this bill's defeat, so that's not my issue; I think that's a reasonable debate to have. As I also said, it's also perfectly reasonable to oppose something all along and then -- once the process is over -- decide you're accepting what you previously said you wouldn't. But what's not reasonable is to pretend that Emanuel wasn't right in his core assumption about progressive behavior. Nobody likes to acknowledge their own powerlessness, but no good can come from shutting one's eyes and pretending it's not true. It's a genuine problem that the threats and demands of progressives (for lack of a better term) aren't taken seriously at all, and will be taken even less seriously now. Facing that problem is a prerequisite to finding a way to solve it.

Obama Inc. Triumphs: Kucinich Folds His Hand on Health Care

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-inc-triumphs-kucinich-folds-his-hand-health-care
Obama Inc. Triumphs: Kucinich Folds His Hand on Health Care
Wed, 03/17/2010
Kucinich had been given an offer that he felt he could not refuse.The Obama administration has finished the job it started in January, 2009: crush the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to clear the way for corporate governance. Rep. Dennis Kucinich's was the last Left opposition to Obama's toxic health care legislation. “Once Obama's private insurers' bailout bill is in place, it will be almost impossible to dismantle in the foreseeable future.”
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“There is nothing for a true progressive to do in Obama's Democratic Party.”

The last Left Democrat in the U.S. Congress has folded his hand, crushed by Wall Street’s servant in the White House, Barack Obama.

Until Wednesday morning, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was the only opposition from the Left still holding out against Obama’s private insurance subsidy bill – a massive redistribution of wealth to Wall Street masquerading as health care reform. The bill was long ago stripped of any fig leaf of a “public option,” and now awaits passage in its pure form – the formal establishment of a private health care system in which the people are forced to finance the profits of some of the biggest players in the Wall Street casino, the insurance corporations. Far from a step forward towards a society in which health care is every person’s right, the Obama bill is a huge step backward in the opposite the direction from which the entire industrialized world has been traveling. Obama’s so-called reform is in fact, a defeat of the dream of universal health care.

Obama used every trick at his disposal to place that dream out of reach. He pulled a shameless bait and switch on health care, talking the language of universality while conniving to transfer trillions of public dollars to the private insurance industry. Once Obama's private insurers' bailout bill is in place, it will be almost impossible to dismantle in the foreseeable future. A trillion dollars buys lots of loyalty. And to make certain that nobody ever gets to cancel the corporate bailout, the Obama regime would prevent states from setting up their own universal health care programs.

“Kucinich was adamant that he had not changed his assessment of the president’s health care proposals.”

Obama knew that, if he were to have any chance to pass a private health insurance subsidy bill, he would first have to bludgeon the Left into submission. In the course of a little over a year, he has accomplished that mission.

To drive Kucinich back to the corporate Democratic reservation, the White House let loose the yapping dogs of the Daily Kos and MoveOn, who threatened to back an opposition candidate to Kucinich in his home district. President Obama personally browbeat Kucinich four times in the last several weeks, the last time on Monday night. According to the London Daily Telegraph, Obama threatened to refuse to campaign for any Democratic congressperson that doesn’t back his health bill – an invitation to the fat cats to fund challengers to Kucinich in November.

In a Wednesday morning press conference announcing his surrender to the White House, Kucinich was adamant that he had not changed his assessment of the president’s health care proposals. “I do not think it is a first step toward anything I have supported in the past,” he said. “This is not the bill I wanted to support.” But Kucinich had been given an offer that he felt he could not refuse.It was, said the congressman, “a defining moment.”

And it was a defining moment for those who believe there is anything politically worthwhile that can be accomplished within the structures of the Democratic Party, now firmly controlled by its corporate wing. There is nothing for a true progressive to do in Obama's Democratic Party, but shut up, and roll over. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to http://www.blackagendareport.com/.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Dennis Kucinich Will Return Money to Donors

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/03/17/dennis-kucinich-will-return-money-to-donors/
Dennis Kucinich Will Return Money to Donors
Jane Hamsher
Wednesday March 17, 2010

Last July, in response to a campaign we launched the month before, 65 members of Congress pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option. At the suggestion of Rep. Donna Edwards, online supporters raised $430,000 to thank them. Dennis Kucinich was one of those members of Congress.

July was also the month that President Obama made a “quid pro quo deal” with the hospitals to exclude the public option from a final health care bill. Miles Mogulescu reports that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina confirmed the deal to David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times.

President Obama disingenuously confirmed his support for the public option in his September address to a joint session of Congress, but, behind the scenes, he was actively working to kill it. Obama wanted Harry Reid to be responsible for taking it out of the final health care bill so he, the president, could remain popular, according to Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo.

But Reid is facing a tough challenge of his own and didn’t want the honors, so — as predicted — Joe Lieberman was called upon to do the dirty work. Far from opposing the President, Lieberman was doing exactly what Obama wanted him to do so that the deal with the hospitals to kill the public option would be honored.

Tom Carper famously said that it was the Senate’s responsibility to honor the deal that Obama made with PhRMA, because after all, they paid for it with $150 million in political advertising for House Democrats. And although PhRMA was nervous about putting more money in until the President delivered on that deal, they have now agreed to another $6 million ad buy in the districts of 38 Democrats.

The objective of the White House with the health care bill has been from the beginning to secure donations of the medical industrial complex for Democrats and assure their re-election in 2010. But recently, they switched their battle plan. While Rahm Emanuel may have been protecting Blue Dogs from “fu&1ing r#%&rd” liberals who wanted to challenge them last fall, the Democratic establishment have now turned on Democrats in conservative-leaning districts for their unwillingness to take a vote that will no doubt cost them their seats. So much for the “big tent.”

The generals are firing on their own troops in the trenches for their unwillingness to go on a suicide mission. It is indeed like a scene from Paths of Glory.

There are currently 36 resolutions in states across the country to ban the mandate which forces people to buy private insurance, or face a penalty of up to 2% of their income that the IRS will collect — the very thing that Obama campaigned against. It will become a rallying cry for the right.

John Shaddegg gives a preview of what the GOP will be saying in the fall:

SHADEGG: You could better defend a public option than you could defend compelling me to buy a product from the people that have created the problem. America’s health insurance industry has wanted this bill and the individual mandate from the get go. That’s their idea. Their idea is “look, our product is so lousy, that lots of people don’t buy it. So we need the government to force people to buy our product. And stunningly, that’s what the Congress appears to be going along with. Why would they do that?

As Jon Walker noted, the President’s recent campaign wherein he railed against insurance companies for jacking up premiums was an exercise in incoherence. “If private insurance companies are evil, why are you forcing me to be their customer?”

The claims made by the administration about the virtues of the health care bill are outright fabrications. As Marcy Wheeler has documented in her post entitled “Health Care and the Road to Neofeudalism,” it does not control either insurance premiums or health care costs. Forcing 31 million people to buy a product they don’t want and can’t afford to use does not constitute health care reform. Once again, the poor get used as human shields so corporations can be the beneficiaries of massive government bailout.

Rather than actually helping the poor, this bill is a dangerous and unprecedented step on the road to domination of government by private corporate players who use it to suppress competition and secure their profits — the textbook definition of fascism.

When we launched the public option campaign in June of 2009, I made several assumptions. One, that the White House ultimately cared more about preserving the Democratic majority than they did about passing a corporate bailout and when forced to choose between the two they would pick the former. And two, that members of Congress have a base interest in keeping their seats and would not cast a vote that jeopardize them.

Both of those assumptions were wrong. Members of Congress are dealing their seats away, planning to retire after the vote is cast in exchange for appointments or other sinecures from the administration. The alternative, as Dennis Kucinich found out, was to be hounded from office by liberal interest groups whose job is now apparently to play enforcer on the left so the President can follow through with his PhRMA and AHIP deals.

This bill has already triggered an electoral crisis that will continue, not only for members of Congress in 2010 but for Democrats across the country.Polling indicates that Democrats plan to stay home just as they did after the passage of NAFTA in 1994. Down ticket races are at serious risk of the “Coakley effect” as independents flock to the GOP. While members of Congress in strong Democratic districts may feel safe from the repercussions, state legislatures that progressive activists have worked so hard to take over the past few years could become casualties of war.

I spoke with Dennis following his speech, and his campaign will return the money to those who have donated in support of his pledge to vote against any health care bill that does not have a public option. It’s the honorable thing to do. While he shouldn’t be expected to carry the weight of the health care bill on his back when the other 64 members of Congress have abandoned him, it is both disheartening and illuminating to realize that the progressives in Congress have no true commitment to anything but putting on a show. Rep. Edwards and her fellow members of Congress should follow Rep. Kucinich’s lead and return the $430,000 they collected from donors for their part in the House kabuki as well.

A PR blitz by the President may sway liberals to support this bill, but it won’t hold. You can’t fight for Medicare prescription drug price negotiation in 2008 when it has no chance of passing, and then fight against it when it actually can, and hope that nobody notices. This is a deeply corrupt bill that among other things puts lifesaving cancer drugs out of the financial reach of many cancer patients by keeping them from becoming available as generics, even after taxpayers footed the bill for their development.

Cokie Roberts said on This Week that the reason the health care bill is so unpopular is because the public option campaign dragged out its passage for so long. She’s right. By forcing the President and members of Congress to keep passing the public option hot potato and reporting on the corruption, lies and lack of affordability that were the hallmarks of the bill, it allowed the public to measure the gap between what Obama says and what he actually does.

That in itself has value, because without broad awareness of the bad faith with which the President engaged in the health care debate, it was difficult to get people to shake off the pixie dust of the 2008 election and deal with the reality of what progressives are up against. We also got to see that the veal pen institutions will be flooded with corporate money expressly for the purpose of neutralizing progressive organizing attempts against corporate control of government.

Few organizations resisted the urge to whip for the very bill they asked members of Congress to oppose last August during the fundraising drive for the public option. The entire progressive movement devolved into complete message incoherence as the unions announced their willingness to step outside of the Democratic party in order to enforce corporate deals within it. The PCCC deserves special mention for staying true to their word throughout.

If indeed this bill passes, people across the country will have to start examining the basic assumptions with which we have heretofore approached politics. The thing I have learned above all else in this campaign is that the corporate control of government is much more extensive than I ever imagined, and the tools we have to fight its influence are ineffective.

We need to develop new partners in the fight, because there is tremendous public will to resist and the old ones can’t be trusted. We also need a new language to describe it, because the old “right-left” paradigm is firing past the true opponent.

The effort to keep this bill from passing lives on after Dennis Kucinich’s defection, though it did indeed signal the death of the progressive resistance in Congress. In the end, what we learned is that we can’t count on members of Congress in either party to do anything but play their part in “villain rotation” — a game they can only play as long as we let them. It is up to each of us to challenge our old ideas and forge new ways to seek out those who are truly willing to oppose the corporate domination of our political system, and help them to do it.

Kucinich drops opposition to health-care bill

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/kucinich-drops-opposition-to-h.html

Kucinich drops opposition to health-care bill
Perry Bacon Jr. and Garance Franke-Ruta | March 17, 2010

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), often a proponent of very liberal, unlikely ideas such as the creation of a "Department of Peace" and the impeachment of then-Vice President Cheney, has found his pragmatic streak.

Under pressure from both President Obama and liberal groups, the Ohio congressman announced Wednesday morning he would back the health-care bill Democrats are trying to push through Congress this week. Long an advocate of a Medicare-for-all health care system, Kucinich in November voted against the House version of the legislation, arguing it "incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem."

"I know I have to make a decision, not on the bill as I would like to see, it but on the bill as it is," the longtime congressman said in a 30-minute press conference on Capitol Hill where he detailed his vote change. "I have doubts about this bill," he said. "...This is not the bill I wanted to support."

"However, after careful discussions with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, my wife Elizabeth and close friends, I have decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation," he said.

Obama called Kucinich's decision to vote yes on health care "a good sign" and said that he had thanked him for the switch.

Kucinich, who had declared himself opposed to the president's health care bills because they did not contain a public option, was the subject of some airborne arm-twisting this week as he flew with Obama on Air Force One.

"I told him thank you," Obama said to reporters as he hosted the Taoiseach of Ireland, Brian Cowen, for a St. Patrick's Day conversation at the White House.

Obama, wearing a light green tie, also thanked Congress for passing the jobs bill, calling it "he first of what
I hope will be a series of jobs packages that help to continue to put people back to work."

The decision makes Kucinich the first Democrat who opposed the legislation in the House in November to change his vote, moving the party closer to the 216 votes it will need by this weekend. But his vote change, while illustrating that even the most liberal of Democrats are now conceding the death of the government insurance option and backing the bill, won't move the vote count beyond Kucinich himself. The vast majority of Democrats who opposed the initial bill or who backed it then but are on the fence now are more moderate Democrats. Only Kucinich and Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.), who has since resigned in the wake of a ethics scandal, opposed the bill from the left.

Kucinich cast himself as being torn for days over the decision, hearing from constituents who implored him "something is better than nothing" and discussing his vote four times over the last several weeks with Obama.

"Every criticism I made, I maintain," he said. "The bill is flawed, it's not the bill I want and I've been pretty vocal about it. So I had to ask myself am I going to just rest on my philosophical position, which I remain committed to and look at the American people and say, 'You know, I'm not going to do this.' There is a moment of decision you have to make."

His decision came under unusual pressure for a lawmaker known mainly for leading liberal causes such as calling for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and opposing the war in Iraq. With Democrats struggling to get the votes needed to pass the bill, the founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos threatened to back a primary challenge if the health-care legislation failed and Kucinich was in the opposition.

And on Monday, as Obama spoke at a rally in Strongville, Ohio, in the congressman's suburban Cleveland district, someone in the audience called out, "Vote yes."

Obama turned to Kucinich, who was on stage for the rally and said, "Did you hear that, Dennis?"

By Tuesday, the usually chatty lawmaker was ducking reporters' questions in the Capitol. But on Wednesday morning, he seemed to bask in the kind of attention he rarely got during his presidential runs in 2004 and 2008.

He bragged of his single-payer stance, saying "I have taken the debate farther than anyone else has taken it."

"This is a defining moment for if we will have any opportunity to move off square one on health care," he said.

Kucinich Caves

Robert Sterling

This is beyond disappointing. Disappointing because here is what Kucinich said about the bill last week:

“This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry. $70 billion dollars a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance, five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases. I told the president twice in two different meetings that I couldn’t support the bill if it didn’t have a robust public option and at least if it didn’t have something that was going to protect consumers from these rampant premium increases."

Here is what he said about it last year:

“There’s nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care. We lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies. And so on they were looking at increasing taxes as a way of subsidizing insurance companies. It’s just madness.”


But now all that criticism is gone, and now Obama's cowardly sellout (and it's time to stop ignoring what has been plainly proven, the most grotesque flaws in this bill are due to Obama's involvement, not his lack of involvement) is the officially sanctioned position of the left, despite this being an extremely right-wing bill.

I only wish Dennis Kucinich had done something slightly less offensive, like impregnate another woman while his wife is suffering from cancer.


Here are my three major problems with Obamacare (and I will always refer to this plan as Obamacare, because I don't want this sniveling betrayer to ever feign that the glaring flaws in this plan aren't by his own administration's design):

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: Forcing people to buy health insurance isn't the answer to people being unable to buy insurance.

NO PUBLIC OPTION: It is clear at this point that the simplest and most effective way to provide quality healthcare is to open Medicare to anyone who wants to buy in. Perhaps theoretically another way could be developed, but in practice any bill will be perverted and compromised by industry money.

MASSIVE CUTS IN MEDICARE & MEDICAID: How does this bill manage to reduce the deficit? By cutting the dollars in healthcare given to the elderly and the poor.

So let's examine this again. Obamacare forces people to buy insurance they can't afford, doesn't allow them any new option to the despised private health insurance system, and cuts the money it gives to Medicare and Medicaid. And this is considered a left-wing bill?

All I can say is the Democrats will suffer greatly over this bill in the short term and long term if it passes. Short term because the public correctly dislikes this bill, although much of this opposition is of a confused nature due to the dishonest presentation in the establishment media. Still, confused as the opposition may be, the public correctly smells a rat here. In the long term, it is even worse thanks to the individual mandate. I am going to make a prediction here, and mark my words, it will be proven right. When the individual mandate goes into effect, thanks to a lack of price controls in a deregulated oligopoly market, the result will be similar to the electricity deregulation in California ten years ago, where insurance companies will engage in elaborate price-fixing schemes to gouge the public and rip them off even more. This bill is a political disaster...

Who are the actual "crazy" people in American politics?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/04/crazy/index.html

Thursday, Mar 4, 2010
Who are the actual "crazy" people in American politics?
By Glenn Greenwald

My Salon colleague, Mark Benjamin, writes about last night's Larry King Show -- featuring a debate between Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson and GOP Rep. Michelle Bachmann -- and does so by repeatedly branding Grayson as being every bit as "crazy" Bachmann. Beginning with the article's headline ("Bachmann and Grayson: A diary of crazy") to his sarcastic description of "these two towering intellects" to his claim that Grayson and Bachmann are "the Candy Stripers of Crazy of their parties," Benjamin denigrates Grayson's intellect and mental health by depicting him -- with virtually no cited basis -- as the Democratic mirror image of Bachmann's rabid, out-of-touch extremism. This view of Grayson has become a virtual Washington platitude, solidified by The New York Times' David Herszenhorn's dismissal of Grayson as "the latest incarnation of what in the American political idiom is known as a wing nut."

There are so many things wrong this analysis. To begin with, it's a classic case of false journalistic objectivity: the compulsion of journalists to posit equivalencies between the "two sides" regardless of whether they are actually equal (since I'm calling a GOP member of Congress "crazy," I now have to find a Democrat to so label). Benjamin cites numerous Bachmann statements that demonstrate her penchant for bizarre claims (and there are many he omitted), but points to only one Grayson statement: his famous floor speech in which he claimed: "If you get sick in America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly." One could reasonably object to that statement as unduly inflammatory rhetoric, but Grayson was one of the only members of Congress willing to forcefully connect health care policy to the actual lives (and deaths) of American citizens. There's nothing crazy about dramatically emphasizing that casual connection; far crazier is to ignore it.

But more important, Grayson has managed to have more positive impact on more substantive matters than any House freshman in a long time (indeed, he makes more of a positive impact than the vast majority of members of Congress generally). He has tapped into his background as successful litigator and his Harvard degrees in law and public policy to shape public discussion on a wide range of issues -- from his highly effective grilling of the Fed Vice Chair regarding massive, secretive Fed activities and aggressive investigation of the fraud surrounding the Wall Street bailout to his unparalleled work exposing defense contractor corruption, his efforts to warn of the unconstitutional underpinnings of anti-ACORN legislation (a federal court proved him right), his creative (if not wise) legislative proposals to limit corporate influence in politics, and his successful, bipartisan crusade to bring more transparency to the Fed. What conceivable basis exists for disparaging as "crazy" one of the few members of Congress who is both willing and able to bring attention to some of the most severe corruption and worst excesses of our political establishment?

The most significant point highlighted by this attack on Grayson as "crazy" is that, in our political discourse, the two party establishments typically define what is "sane," and anyone outside of those parameters is, by definition, "crazy." "Crazy" is the way that political orthodoxies are enforced and the leadership of the two political parties preserved as the only viable choices for Sane People to embrace. Anyone who tiptoes outside of those establishment parameters -- from Ron Paul on the right to Dennis Kucinich on the left, to say nothing of Further Left advocates -- is, more or less by definition, branded as "crazy" by all Serious, mainstream people.

The converse is even more perverse: the Washington establishment -- which has endorsed countless insane policies, wrought so much destruction on every level, and has provoked the intense hatred of the American citizenry across the ideological spectrum -- is the exclusive determinant for what is "sane." As long as one remains snugly within its confines, one will be shielded from the "crazy" appellation regardless of how many genuinely crazy views one embraces. Positing proximity to the Washington Establishment -- of all things -- as the Hallmark of Political Sanity is about as irrational as it gets, yet that continues to be the barometer of Political Normalcy.

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist ("Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members"), and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.

Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.

While all of that is happening, those whom all Serious, Sane people agree are Crazy -- people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul and Alan Grayson -- vehemently oppose most if not all of that and try to find ways to expand the realm of legitimate debate and political alliances beyond the suffocating stranglehold of those responsible. So who exactly is Crazy? That Grayson sometimes treats our political discourse as the ludicrous freak show that it is, rather than pretending that it is substantive, sober and Serious, is evidence of his sanity -- not the opposite.

Are there positions held by people like Kucinich, Paul and Grayson that are fairly characterized as radical and wrong? Certainly: that's true for everyone, most of all the mavens of the Washington Establishment whose followers claim a monopoly on Sanity and demonize as Crazy all who deviate. But between establishment crazies and those who have been marginalized by them as Crazy, the former have wrought far more damage than the latter. It's not even a close call. There are many legitimate ways to measure Craziness; the extent to which one deviates from the orthodoxies of the political establishment is most assuredly not one of them. If anything, given the character and record of the American political establishment, such deviation is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for actual sanity.

Kucinich shreds Democrats

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/exclusive-kucinich-shreds-democrats/

Exclusive: Kucinich shreds Democrats for betraying the promise of change
Sahil Kapur
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Slams health bill 'madness'

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) on Wednesday said the Massachusetts election was a "wake up call" for Democrats and that his party had better change course or it could suffer devastating losses come November.

"People elected Democrats in 2008 to change the country's direction," he told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview.

"And the same entrenched interests that George Bush could not shake, this current White House is having great difficulty in shaking. One could suggest they might be more entrenched than ever."

Kucinich staunchly defended liberalism but alleged that Democrats are not behaving like liberals.

"There's nothing liberal about the bailouts. There's nothing liberal about standing by and watching banks use public money to get their executive bonuses. There's nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care... Since when did that become liberal?"

"There's nothing liberal about letting coal and oil write climate change legislation," he added. "Are you kidding me?"

The 13-year congressman lamented the lack of change in economic policies, tying it to the major problems Democrats are facing.

"The minute the president appointed Tim Geithner and Larry Summers to key policy positions, and the minute that [Ben] Bernanke was named to head the Fed again, we're looking at people who participated in the decline of the economy," he said. "This group has done us a disservice."

"Every area of the economy is still about taking wealth from the great mass of people and putting it into the hands of a few. If you don't have a economic democracy, you don't have a political democracy."

"We have to be more defined as being on the side of the people and not on the side of interest groups that are so entrenched," said Kucinich, who is widely regarded as a champion on progressive issues.

Dems 'jumped in bed with insurance companies'

Kucinich said he's deeply disillusioned with what health reform has become, suggesting Democrats should "slow down" and "take a step back."

"Health care became too complex and too riddled with concessions to insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies," he said. "It's really time to take a new direction and that direction has to be back to the American people."

One idea Democrats are floating is to pass the Senate bill through the House, which would then allow the President to sign it into law.

"I don't think that's going to happen," he said. "The senate bill is so totally flawed that I don't think it can get the votes in the House to pass. I certainly wouldn't vote for it."

"It hits very sharply at people who gave wage concessions to get health care benefits," he said, citing the excise tax on health care benefits. "We're going to ask Americans to take a wage cut? Why?"

"We lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies. And soon they were looking at increasing taxes as a way of subsidizing insurance companies. It's just madness."

"We're redistributing the wealth of the nation upwards by giving the insurance companies 30 million new customers, $50 billion a year more in revenue."

A number of progressives and Democrats disagree with Kucinich's conclusion, and say despite its flaws the health care bill is at least an important step toward expanding coverage and reducing costs.

"Well, which direction are we building in?" Kucinich responded. "If we give insurance companies a monopoly on health care, if we put no controls on premiums, if we give them antitrust exemptions... Is this the direction we build in to protect health care for people, or to protect insurance companies?"

He said part of America's distrust for the bill is the special deals the leadership cut with certain Senators, citing Sen. Ben Nelson's exemption for Medicaid expenses in Nebraska.

"People know when things get to that point, it's time to stay stop. Stop what you're doing. Don't make another move. Slow it down. That's the message from Massachusetts."

Kucinich voiced his long-held view that the best way to address health care is to achieve a "Medicare-for-all system." He said Democrats shouldn't abandon health reform, but need to signal they realize it's been mishandled.

Rips Obama admin on economy, giving Wall Street 'immunity'

Kucinich said the Massachusetts election was also a referendum on the Obama administration's "inadequate" response to the economic crisis.

"We ought to focus on creating 15 million jobs, and if we do that, we'll regain the confidence of the American people on domestic issues," he said.

"With people losing their jobs, losing their homes, their investments, their savings, retirement security, losing opportunities for their children to go to college, we have to focus on economic issues."

The congressman from Ohio claimed these problems have arisen because the system is skewed against the interests of the people, and that Obama's economic team isn't helping to solve them.

He said the Obama administration was giving Wall Street banks "immunity and too big to fail protection," saying they "even pride themselves on that."

"People understand the precarious nature of the economy, and that's what they're responding to in Massachusetts."

"We're really at a moment here, a moment of pivot. We need to regain the confidence of the American people by rallying them on the economic issues. But if not, Massachusetts will just be a harbinger of what's to come."

Special interests 'more entrenched than ever'

Kucinich lamented Democrats' growing camaraderie with big moneyed interests, claiming it's hurting the party.

"You ask the banks to reform banking?" he said. "Put the insurance companies to reform insurance. Call in nuclear to reform energy policies? Are you kidding me?"

"These problems, lest we forget, did not start with Barack Obama," Kucinich said. "It was George Bush drove the economy over the cliff with a trillion dollar tax cut and a war based on lies, and an expanding trade deficit."

"And we can't do that by playing patty-cake with Wall Street, by caving into the demands of big banks, by playing footsie with insurance companies and by jumping in bed with the pharmaceutical industry.

"Americans are really skittish about the economy, and they have every right to be," he said. "This isn't a left-right argument; this isn't a liberal-conservative argument. This is about down or up."

"We have a really deep recession, and the only way to bring it back up is to have a massive jobs program," he said. "I don't see any evidence" that Obama's economic team is standing behind that.

"We have to listen to what the message is from Massachusetts. We better listen carefully."

Beyond left and right

In what may come as a surprise to some of his supporters, Kucinich declined to blame Republicans for what he believes have been economic policies gone awry.

"We have to be looking at ourselves," he claimed. "We have to be looking at what we need to do to govern... It's really simple: the people don't like what we're doing."

"Democrats have to look at our own responsibilities, not the Republicans' responsibilities," he said. "If we want to give the mantle of leadership to Republicans, they're the minority, they're willing to take it."

Kucinich said the Democratic strategy, as unveiled in a leaked internal memo obtained by Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler, of urging Republicans to take more responsibility was "wrong."

"This isn't about the Republicans, this is about the Democrats."

"There's been a serious mislabeling of politics in America, where there's an attempt to confuse people about who stands for what, and in that it's the triumph of special interests."

'Still time to recover'

Kucinich said that despite the Democrats' turn in the wrong direction, they can still win back the people's trust.

"I'm not one who believes the sky is falling," he said. "We just need to listen to what people are saying. The people of Massachusetts sent the message that they're not willing to be taken for granted."

"Democrats need to take a more aggressive stance," Kucinich posited. "The only time I've ever voted against my party is when I thought we could do better, and be stronger."

"We can only keep our majority if this wake-up call is used in a constructive way, and we have our eyes open."

"We just had an alarm go off in Massachusetts, and we better wake up. Because if we shut the clock off and go back to sleep, when we wake up in November we could end up in the minority."

Despite his harrowing words, Kucinich said he "remains optimistic" that Democrats can "turn things around."

"We still have enough time to recover. A political eternity exists between now and November. Plenty of time. But we have to really reset the pointer of our political direction."

Quote of the Month: Dennis Kucinich

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement on the House Floor about H. Res 867, which condemns the ‘Goldstone Report’ or the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict:

“Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.

“Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

“The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the 'Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right' resolution.

“Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.

“How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?

“How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?

“We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.”

Source:

http://warincontext.org/2009/11/04/us-house-rejects-goldstone-report/

Dennis Kucinich: The Public Option is Dead

http://commentsfromleftfield.com/2009/09/dennis-kucinich-the-public-option-is-dead-long-live-the-public-option

Dennis Kucinich: The Public Option is Dead, Long Live the Public Option
September 25th, 2009
Michael Tedesco

As I eluded to in this post on Tuesday, I participated in a conference call between the Canadian membership of Democrats Abroad and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich on the topic of health care reform. The reason for my participation is simple. I am an American citizen working for an American corporation but living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

When I was offered the opportunity to relocate from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Vancouver, British Columbia I did as any other person would do, I consulted my wife and together we listed out all of the pro’s, con’s, opportunities and risks surrounding this potential move. Uprooting a young family is not something that should be taken lightly no matter how lucrative the opportunity may seem. In the end, one of the items that helped tip the scales in favor of relocation was Canada’s single payer health care system.

Now, I can already hear the angry mobs amassing at the comment section ready to shout their uninformed drivel about how awful the Canadian health care system is, how people are dying in the street waiting for services, and how such a horrific socialist system would never work in the U.S. To that let me just say one thing. Bullshit.

It has been nearly two years since I took my family to Canada and so far our experience with the health care system is quite the opposite. But that is not why I am writing today so rather than spend too much time here talking about it I promise another post (or series) on the topic at a later date.

Back to the topic at hand. So Tuesday I participated in this con call with Rep. Kucinich fully expecting to be on the receiving end of another one of those political action speeches where the politician shows up and rally’s the troops to whatever end he/she has in mind. Instead, I was greeted by an open line conference call where all participants introduced themselves and each had an opportunity to ask a question of the Representative. Refreshing to say the least.

My question was simple, after having watched both House Oversight Committee hearings on health care reform lead by the congressman I asked him this:

“During the hearings you stated that your bill (HR676) was likely DOA. Can you explain why? What is preventing our representatives from actually acting in the interest of their constituency.”

His answer was not at all what I expected. He lead by defending his effort. “First let me point out that hr676 has 70 co-sponsors in the house of representatives” which I agree nothing to sneeze at. But then came the message that Kucinich had decided he wanted to carry to this group of American expats,

“In 2000 I tried to bring a bill and was asked by the head of the Gore campaign not to bring it because of the funding they were receiving [from the health care industry].

In 2008 I was excluded from debates that were sponsored by health insurance companies. It is a huge business and they are determined not to let go of it. They use their influence to buy their way through. Even a weak public option is not going to get through this congress.”

And he did not end with that. In answer after answer to each question posed by the group he hammered home two distinct messages. 1) In this congress the public option is dead and 2) a public option will eventually prevail but it will be a decade long struggle.

When questioned about whether the blue-dog Democrats were in effect siding with the Republicans and/or the health care industry Kucinich said:

“It’s my opinion that the blue dogs are doing exactly what the White House wants them to do. The public option was a trial balloon. I can not stress how cynical and brutal the politics are. This is not about the public option. Anyone looking for the public option needs to look someplace else. It is not going to happen and anybody who says it is is in fantasy land.”

When asked about what can be done for American health care reform Kucinich took the position of a man with a deeper understanding of the true struggle:

“We have to take a long term perspective on this. 8-10 years down the road. This is a civil rights movement we have here. I think we are going to have single payer in the states one day. Unfortunately there are going to be many people who get sick, go broke and die before we get there.”

What Kucinich was doing was resetting expectations and delivering a hard message to the majority of Americans that support a public option today.

He was saying do not expect a public option any time soon. Whatever might get through this congress masquerading as a public option will not be worth much. And if a public option is ever to pass on a national level it will likely come only after a groundswell of grassroots effort. Reset your clocks for a long term fight. Work with local organizations such as the one being lead by Chuck Pennacchio in Pennsylvania with HealthCare4AllPA.

Why the Public Option is Doomed To Fail

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-public-option-doomed-fail-and-what-can-be-done-about-it

Wed, 09/23/2009
The generous, expansive public option on the lips of Congressional progressives, which would be open to all and compete to lower insurance prices is largely imaginary, while the president's stingy, divisive and means-tested version is all too real.
But what about the third version of the public option? What is the Congressional Progressive Caucus doing to promote it, and to allow states to pursue single payer on their own?

Why the Public Option is Doomed To Fail, and What Can Be Done About It.
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Some highly profitable and job creating industries simply cannot be reformed. Slavery and child labor cannot not be made humane and reasonable, not with kind and solicitous masters or school and limited hours for the kids. Allowing souless and greedy corporations to collect a toll for standing between patients and doctors is immoral, uneconomical, and just plain wrong. But it's not illegal. Not in the US, at any rate, not yet.

The issue in health care reform today is how much longer and under what conditions private insurance companies will be allowed to collect tolls for rationing and denying health care. The public option is a cruel and cynical hoax inside of a much larger scam. The great scam is the substitution on the part of the president and his party, of health insurance reform for their campaign promise of universal health care for all Americans. The public option is, at bottom, an excuse not to abolish the role of private insurance death panels and toll collectors in the nation's health care system.

Nobody can read the president's mind, but he did promise to construct health care legislation in an open and transparent manner, even "on C-SPAN." Instead, Obama handed off the drafting of health care legislation to five House and three Senate committees. The most generous view is that he did this to give legislators a stake in the bills, and because there is this thing called the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Another view is that the embedded influence of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine were easier to conceal when spread out over several committees, where the lobbyists are themselves former congressmen, senators and their top staffers, and many current members and staff look forward to the same career paths. These are the men and women who wrote what is and will be the president's health insurance reform legislation. The result has been a half dozen versions of a thousand-plus page bill, chock full, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibi points out, of deliberately obscure references to other legislation. Nobody can authoritatively claim to have read, much less understand all of it. And that's just the way insurance companies and the president like it. HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which does provide universal coverage at reasonable cost, comes in at under thirty pages.

To begin with, there are no less than three versions of the public option. The first is an imaginary public option first conceived by Political Science grad student Jacob Hatcher in 2001. It was to postpone the death of private insurance companies by forcing them to compete with a publicly funded insurer open to all comers which would drive their prices downward. This imaginary public option has never been written into law, and is not under consideration in Congress this year. It lives pretty much in the minds of the public and the lips of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, MoveOn.Org and many others. It's in the mouth of Howard Dean, who says it will be just like Medicare, only available to everybody. To distinguish it from the President Obama's version, it is usually called "the robust public option."

The second version of the public option is not imaginary, it is all too real. President Obama explicitly outlined its contours in his health care address earlier this month. Unlike the expansive and inclusive imaginary public option championed by MoveOn.Org, the president's public option will be stingy, means-tested, socially divisive, actuarially unsound and doomed to failure, unless its objective is simply to discredit the word "public" in the term "public option." The president has said it will be limited to 5% of the nation's population, those Americans too poor to afford the cheapest insurance available on his regulated "insurance exchanges" which won't be fully implemented anyway till 2013. Those making more than a very small wage will be ineligible for the president's version of the public option, and those who currently get insurance from their employers, no matter how skimpy the coverage, how high the co-pays and deductibles, will also not qualify. Those who receive relatively good (or maybe not so good) coverage from their employers will pay a special tax to support both the public option and the subsidies the government will pay to enable others not quite poor enough for the public option to fulfill their legal obligation to buy shoddy insurance from private vendors.

In a social culture where Americans have been taught to despise poverty and the poor, even when they themselves are poor and near poverty, this will be bitterly and inherently divisive. It will provide economic incentive for the working poor to look down on and resent whatever benefits those even poorer than themselves receive. It turns medical coverage for the poor into stigmatized welfare subsidized by the near-poor, and all to the continuing profit of insurance companies.

And since the pool accessed by the public option will be relatively older, poorer and thus more chronically ill, it will not be economically viable in and of itself, must less of the size needed to compete with private insurers and drive their prices downward. The president's public option is of course, buried in multiple versions of thousand-plus page bills that he allowed to be drafted by no less than five House and three Senate committees. The draft bills themselves, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibi tells us, are chock full of obscure references to other legislation, so to get a full grasp of the proposals one would have to read at least 6 thousand pages of constantly changing stuff.

It's hard to put forward a benign reason for this level of obfuscation, when the president specifically promised that his health care legislation would be drawn up in the bright sunlight of public view, as he put it, "on C-SPAN." The only logical reason for allowing so many lengthy and obscure versions of his own health insurance legislation to be written is to frustrate public scrutiny, and to hide the degree to which lobbyists for Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Medicine actually wrote the thing. These interests have long been embedded in the Congress, where the head lobbyists are former legislators and their top staff, and current staff look forward to the same career path. The participation of these types would have been much harder to conceal in any drafting of the bill that the White House convened. By comparison, HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act comes in just under thirty pages.

The only good thing one can say about the president's version of the public option is that even he is not firmly attached to it, and does not regard it as essential to his package. That's actually good news.

Beyond the imaginary "robust public option" of MoveOn.Org, and the divisive, destructive public option of the presdient, there is a third public option, a very real one. It;'s HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All bill, sponsored by John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich. Unlike the mostly imaginary "robust public option" of MoveOn.Org, it actually exists and ordinary people can read and understand it. Unlike the president's public option, which does not take effect till 2013, a fact still ignored by most of the mainstream media, HR 676 can be put into effect almost immediately. The first Medicare back in 1965-66 took only eleven months to send out the first cards and pay the first medical bills.

The White House of course, is not listening to the public outcry for Medicare For All. For example, a group of Oregon physicians calling themselves the Mad As Hell Doctors put up a web site that included an email-the-president page. After the White House received only about 5,000 emails in the first few days, it elected to block emails coming from the Mad As Hell Doctors as spam. Never mind that tracking polls as late as this June indicate majority support among the public for the simple extension of Medicare benefits to everybody.

And although the progressive caucus in Congress continues to wistfully describe its imaginary version of the public option as a line in the sand, it is neither lining up votes for a promised HR 676 floor vote, nor are they demanding that caucus members support amendments to let states to pursue their own versions of single payer in the near future. Congress is being set up to accept anything with the name "public option" and be done with it, even the president's cynical and divisive proposal. The die is cast. The Obama proposals, written by the health insurance lobbyists may pass, but they're not worthwhile. The president's version of the public option, if it stays in the bill is doomed to fail, and the MoveOn version never existed. The only possibility for the real public option, Medicare For All, this year is on the state level. That door will be opened or closed by the Congress this year.

It happens that occasionally, highly profitable industries in which many people make their livings are beyond reform. Slavery and child labor are two examples. Kinder and wiser slavemasters, shorter hours and occasional school for the kiddie workers would not do the trick. Both these institutions had to go. The time for private health insurers, who exist only to collect a toll for standing between the sick and their medical care is almost up.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus can partially redeem their sorry capitulation to the president and Big Insurance by insisting that states be allowed to go their own way on single payer, the only real public option.

Obama Joker artist unmasked: A fellow Chicagoan

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him... In terms of domestic policy, I don't think he's really doing much good for the country right now. We don't have to 'hero worship' the guy."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/obama-joker-artist.html

Obama Joker artist unmasked: A fellow Chicagoan
August 17, 2009

When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image?

Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain?

Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago.

Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software.

Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr. Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.

Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.

Alkhateeb's original Flickr page surpassed 20,000 views. The Times found his Flickr site last week thanks to a tip left by a loyal reader of The Ticket. By Friday, the page had been taken down.

On Alkhateeb's page, a manipulated image condemning fellow Chicagoan and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (captioned "epic fail") was mixed in with parodies of the "Guitar Hero" game franchises -- dubbed Quran Hero -- and of Napoleon riding a motorcycle.

Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars discussing inquiries about individual users.

Alkhateeb says he wasn't actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about connecting his name with anything critical of the president -- especially living in Chicago, where people are "very, very liberal," he said.

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."

"I abstained from voting in November," he wrote in an e-mail. "Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state." If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Possibly becoming a villain in his home city wasn't his only worry. Time's cover and the Joker obviously aren't Alkhateeb's copyrights to fool around with.

Concerned about a lawsuit, Alkhateeb, an unnamed superstar whose nationally recognized artwork had stunned friends and family, was relieved that the situation had floated for months without any major news organizations discovering that he was the man behind the paint.

After we contacted him, he hesitantly agreed to an interview.

If it's any consolation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that defends digital rights, says Alkhateeb has a strong fair-use defense if Time or DC Comics decides to take him to court -- that is if one even does file a lawsuit.

"You really want to think twice about going after a political commenter," said Corynne McSherry, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. In Time's case, "a news organization probably doesn't want to be in the situation of pursuing political criticism."

Perhaps the strongest case for anyone, McSherry said, is for Alkhateeb to claim money derived from people selling T-shirts with his picture. Is it worth pursuing? "It would be nice, but it's not that big of a deal," Alkhateeb said.

Although Alkhateeb claims he was making no political statement with the artwork, he's plugged into the Washington debate. Though born in the United States, his Palestinian family closely follows Middle Eastern politics.

"I think he's definitely doing better than Bush was," Alkhateeb said of Obama. Alkhateeb's views on foreign relations align with the Democrats, he said, while he prefers Republican ideals on domestic issues.

Alkhateeb's assessment of Obama: "In terms of domestic policy, I don't think he's really doing much good for the country right now," he said. "We don't have to 'hero worship' the guy."

Someday, Alkhateeb hopes to be a history teacher and high school football coach. He won't be pursuing a full-time career in art, but he'll continue playing with Photoshop on the side. He's honored by Shepard Fairey's assessment of his Joker picture, but disagrees with some of Fairey's comments criticizing the message of the Socialism poster.

"He made a picture of Bush as a vampire," Alkhateeb said about Fairey. "That's kind of speaking with two faces."

Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama "Hope" artist about "socialism" being the wrong caption for the Joker image. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he said. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"
-- Mark Milian

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_hits_Iraq_withdrawal_You_cant_0227.html

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal: 'You can't be in and out'
Stephen C. Webster
Friday February 27, 2009

It wasn't even one year ago when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and members of his political campaign said now-President Barack Obama "seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."

Which is what makes this week's announcement of -- and the fallout from -- President Obama's plan to withdrawal troops from Iraq so surprising. It isn't the opposition party Obama must now win over: It's his own political allies.

Sen. McCain and top Republican leaders actually support the Democratic administration's plan, while some top Democrats have openly criticized it. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), himself a former presidential candidate, hit back Friday against a portion of Obama's plan which would leave 35-50,000 "observer" soldiers in the country.

"You can't be in and out at the same time," said Kucinich in a media advisory.

"America must determine at some point to end the occupation, close the bases and bring the troops home," he said. "We must bring a conclusion to this sorry chapter in American history where war was waged under false pretense against an innocent people. Taking troops out of Iraq should not mean more troops available for deployment in other operations.

"In February of 2007 I presented H.R. 1234, legislation that would end the war in Iraq, and the process I outlined is still necessary. We should immediately bring home American service members and contractors, convene a regional conference to prepare an international peace-keeping force and accelerate Iraq-driven reconstruction."

"As a candidate for President, I made clear my support for a timeline of 16 months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and protect our troops," Obama said on Friday. "Those consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months."

Obama added, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."

Congressman Kucinich has been a leading opponent of the Iraq war policy even well before many of his Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives came to agree with his position.

Beast of the Month - October 2008

Beast of the Month - October 2008
The Wall Street $700 Billion Bailout Swindle, Gigantic Financial Scam

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"This plan is immoral. This plan is a disgrace. It bails out people on Wall Street who have speculated and who would drive this economy into the ground unless we have some controls on them... What's happening is this bailout proposal helps the few at the expense of the many."
Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a rare voice of honesty, on the Wall Street swindle

Even in the world of Beasthood, what we refer to as "The Wall Street $700 Billion Bailout Swindle" took an unusual path to winning The Konformist Beast of the Month.

After all, the Wall Street bailout (or, as it has since been rebranded in much of the mainstream press, the Wall Street "rescue" - as, for some strange reason, the term "bailout" has led the plan to be viewed in the public as some sort of rip-off) didn't even exist before September 20th. That's when it was first proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, George W. Bush's point man for the continuing economic crisis. Of course, the fact that the bailout was cooked up by Bush and his minions was the first reason the public was rightfully skeptical about the whole scheme.

Which leads to the second reason: the amount. $700 billion, of course, is a hell of a lot of money. So the question needs to be asked, just how was this amount decided? Certainly there must have been some kind of elaborate economic study where the amount was derived from, right? Well, actually, according to Forbes Magazine, a Treasury spokeswoman explained: "It’s not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.” Or, more to the point, a number large enough to put the public in a panic so they would quickly support it without debate.

This leads to the third reason: isn't there a bit of deja vu in this whole set-up? After all, the attempt to use hysteria to ram a controversial bill through Congress without debate, isn't this what happened after 9/11 with the Patriot Act? And wasn't this irrational propaganda push exactly what preceded the Iraq War as well? Hasn’t the American public played Charlie Brown to Bush's Lucy Van Pelt enough times to know that Team Bush can't be trusted?

The good news is that the public DID conclude Team Bush couldn't be trusted. According to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, sentiments on the bailout from voters was "universally negative" by a rate of 95 percent. Her assessment seemed to be echoed by her cohorts in Congress: California Senator Dianne Feinstein declared she had received more than 50,000 calls and letters over the bailout plan, with the overwhelming majority opposed to it. California's other Senator was more specific: according to Barbara Boxer, only 40 out of over 2,000 calls to her California office were for the bailout, and her D.C. office had opposition at 917 to 1. Meanwhile, a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times September 19-22 poll found opposition to the bailout 55 to 31 percent, and a USA Today/Gallup September 24 survey found 56 to 22 percent that the public wanted Congress to pass a plan different from the Paulson proposal.

The bad news is that the negative public sentiments weren't echoed in the korporate media, which went out of its way to propagandize for the scam. The thinly concealed bailout PR went into overdrive after it was stunningly rejected in the House by a vote of 228 to 205 on September 29. Beyond the yellow journalism used to propagandize for the bailout, arm-twisting in the Beltway hit new lows. Southern Cal Congressman Brad Sherman had this to say about the DC political atmosphere: “The one thing that’s been proven is the absolute fear-mongering that’s being used to drive us is false. I’ve seen members turn to each other and say if we don’t pass this bill, we’re going to have martial law in the United States.” Despite this climate, a few politicians had some rather observant comments to make about the bailout. Spencer Bachus, a Republican, declared: "It caught all of us on the Hill by surprise. It was a gun to our head. And any time we rush on that stuff we make mistakes." Democrat Pete Stark of Northern California concluded: "I think we are being railroaded in the same manner we were to vote for Iraq." House Republican leader John Boehner called it class warfare, saying, "We should not be bailing out Wall Street on the backs of the American taxpayers." Dennis Kucinich was even more to the point, stating it was "too much money, in too short of a time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered... Is this the U.S. Congress or the board of directors at Goldman Sachs?" Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd (chairman of the Senate Banking Committee) summed it up thusly: "It does nothing in my view to help a single family save a home."

Even with these comments and widespread opposition, the fix was in. A slightly modified version of the bill was passed in the Senate on October 1, by a vote of 74-25. (To evade the Constitutional requirement that spending bills begin in the House, it was introduced as an "amendment" to an existing bill already passed by the House, replacing the entire text.) It was then resubmitted to the House, who this time passed the bill 263-171 on October 3rd. This despite the following issues:

* CONCENTRATED POWERS: The original proposal by Paulson made the Treasury Secretary's decisions non-reviewable by any court or administrative agency. On this point, noted economist Nouriel Roubini commented: "He's asking for a huge amount of power. He's saying, 'Trust me, I'm going to do it right if you give me absolute control.' This is not a monarchy." Frank Razzano, a former SEC attorney, described it as "dictatorial power unreviewable by the third branch of government, the courts, to try to resolve the crisis. We are taking a huge leap of faith." This point became so controversial, it was dropped from the final bill, but even without it, it provided one man unprecedented powers to influence and interfere with the economic marketplace with a gigantic sum of money.

* CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Making matters worse, the one man given these unprecedented powers was Paulson himself, the unelected Treasury head who impersonated Nero on a fiddle while the subprime crisis morphed into the financial crisis. (For this, Paulson received the prestigious BOTM trophy in April. Great job, Hank!) Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, which stands to reap huge benefits from the plan, as do many of his former associates and colleagues. It is also plausible to assume Paulson will cover-up any criminal activity by corporations and executives involved in the financial meltdown. Congressman Peter DeFazio cynically suspected Congress was being "rolled by a Wall Street executive who is masquerading as the secretary of the Treasury."

* ALL THE MONEY WILL LIKELY DISAPPEAR: The bailout calls for using the $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks. This means that the Treasury will receive the worst of the assets from Wall Street, the ones with the lowest likelihood of any return. Meanwhile, as noted on the Calculated Risk blog, the bill doesn't merely give the Treasury Secretary $700 billion to use as he pleases once, but rather a total of $700 billion at one time. This means if any money is actually returned to the Treasury, it can be poured back into Wall Street. Such a strategy seems doomed to leave the Treasury stuck with $700 billion in the most toxic of investments, with Wall Street off scot-free and the American taxpayer left holding the bag.

* WALL STREET EXECUTIVES GET A FREE RIDE: The plan calls for no limits on pay to CEOs and other executives of companies receiving the funds, a point that lead to deserved criticism. If the American public gives $700 billion to Wall Street in these tough economic times, shouldn't the heads of these companies (who created the crisis with their own reckless decisions) be willing to make some sacrifice in return? Not according to Paulson, who claims such limits would lead to companies not participating in the bailout. Despite much feigned outrage and finger wagging from the Democrats (including House Financial Services chairman Barney Frank stating that CEOs who refuse pay cuts are "selfish and unpatriotic") the final plan passed without changing this.

* COST: As previously pointed out, $700 billion is a lot of money. The amount would also likely push the 2009 budget deficit over $1 trillion, possibly even to the astounding level of $1.5 trillion. Even at $1 trillion, the amount of the deficit would be nearly 2.5 times the previous record amount set in 2004, and at 7 percent of GDP, it would best the previous record during 1983, when Ronald Reagan's "Voodoo Economics" and a major recession led to a 6 percent rate. This will fuel political demands for cuts in social services to the poor and middle class, while Wall Street executives continue to live large.

* $700 BILLION IS TIP OF THE ICEBERG: As noted by CNBC on September 21, Wall Street had already received $1.1 trillion dollars in bailout money this year already, meaning the total now amounts to $1.8 trillion. Meanwhile, Bloomberg TV analyst Marc Faber predicts the total bailout for Wall Street will eventually amount to an astounding $5 trillion. Economist Michael Hudson (who was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor during his presidential campaign) has warned that funneling these gigantic sums of money into Wall Street is a "once in a century rip-off" that could lead to hyperinflation and the collapse of the dollar, the same things which destroyed Germany's Weimar Republic and created Hitler's Third Reich.

* ZERO FOR THE POOR & MIDDLE CLASS: As early as March, The Konformist was noting the gross inequity in what was being pumped into Wall Street and what was being done for those facing foreclosure due to the subprime crisis. Cut to October, and still not a penny of federal money or help has gone to the American working class. It's time to call class warfare what it is. As Michael Hudson put it: "It’s not a bailout, it's a give away and it's a give away that will create a new Kleptocracy of billionaires."


Of course, all these objections are met by establishment mouthpieces with the following predictable refrain: "Well, we have to do something." Of course, "something" shouldn't mean "the worst plan cooked up by the most cynically exploitative political mob in the history of America." Here are some alternative views that could have been explored instead of Bush's Wall Street Swindle:

* New York Times economist Paul Krugman recommended the Treasury purchase equity capital instead of toxic assets. Instead of being stuck with bad investments, the Treasury would be invested in companies and could expect some returns from their $700 billion. This is precisely what was done during the S&L bailout and the highly successful Swedish banking rescue of the 1990s.

* In The Wall Street Journal, Hillary Clinton called for helping regular homeowners instead of just throwing money to Wall Street. She advocated creating a new Home Owners' Loan Corporation, modeled after the New Deal program. The HOLC would help homeowners refinance their mortgages, combined with a moratorium on foreclosures and freezing of rate hikes in ARM loans.

* Economist Nouriel Roubini combined reviving the HOLC along with a new Resolution Trust Corporation (used to recover funds during the S&L crisis) and Reconstruction Finance Corporation (another New Deal plan to provide liquidity to the banking system) to battle the crisis. He would also comment: "It is pathetic that Congress did not consult any of the many professional economists that have presented – many on the Monitor Finance blog forum – alternative plans that were more fair and efficient."

* Filmmaker Michael Moore may not be a respected economist or a politician, but his populist instincts are central to his popularity. On his Website, he advocated a policy that combined the following principals: have any bailout paid for by taxes on the wealthy, corporations and investors; equity capital in all banks for any bailout money; limiting executive pay to 40 times what their average worker makes (currently the average is an outrageous 400 to 1); rejection of the "deregulation" that has gone on since the eighties; breaking up giant corporations so the "It's too big to fail" bailout defense can't be used; focusing any bailout on homeowners and families rather than banks and corporations, including direct loans from the government to the public; and, almost as important, appointing a special prosecutor to indict any criminal behavior on Wall Street.

* Rosalind Resnick of Entrepreneur Magazine provided details of a plan that would flesh out Michael Moore's radical vision: loans to the public at the federal fund rate (the rate banking institutions get) of 2 percent for all homeowners to refinance mortgages, as well as to consumers for their credit card debt, auto loans and other debts. She argued such a plan "would cost U.S. taxpayers absolutely nothing" and would almost certainly jump start the economy, all while cutting out the middle man.

* Even conservative Republicans came up with a better plan than the Bush Team did. They proposed creation of a federal mortgage insurance plan funded by the banks themselves, thus making any "bailout" paid for solely by the industry itself. Granted, their proposal only deals with the symptoms of the economic crisis and still doesn't help the average family facing foreclosure, but at least it is paid for more fairly than the Paulson plan.


Of course, this leads to the greatest irony of the Wall Street bailout scam: though it was proposed by the Bush Administration, it was actually supported and pushed through thanks to the Democrats rather than the GOP. The divide was especially noted in the House: both times the bailout was voted on, the Democrats approved it by a majority (140-95 and 172-62) while the Republicans opposed it (65-133 and 91-108.) Part of the reason for Republican rejection is ideological: after decades of the right wing embracing the laissez faire economic philosophy espoused by Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, it's hard to square that with advocating a $700 billion giveaway to the bankers without admitting your entire economic talking points have been a lie. But perhaps the better explanation is that after eight years of having their fortunes tied to George W. Bush and seeing where it's gotten them, GOP congressmen looked at an unpopular proposal created by an unpopular man and decided not to drink the Kool-Aid.

The Democratic Party showed no such wisdom. After sniveling to Shrub and his minions for so long, they pathetically caved in to a man with no political capital once again. This time, however, they can't whine like they did over the Patriot Act, Iraq or even the recent FISA bill that they were forced into it by the Republicans: the votes in Congress prove this has their fingerprints on it more than the Elephant Party.

That's fine with Barack Obama. His campaign appeared confused and fading when the financial crisis hit center stage in September. Thanks to his unblinking support for a Wall Street giveaway, Obama cheerleading in the korporate media (which has been objectively relentless throughout the past year) went through the roof, while Palin-fever and McCain became increasingly mocked. (Sarah and John's apparent utter cluelessness on the financial crisis - no doubt fueled by the previously mentioned blatant dichotomy of McCain-Palin supporting the bailout while still clinging to right-wing economics - certainly aided this deserved mocking.) Obama's nosedive in public opinion polls suddenly reversed, and if he does win the presidency, the financial crisis was the final turning point for him in the election. Still, the question has to be asked how much his change in fortune was due to his candidacy being financed by the same Wall Street now benefiting from the scam.

Then again, Obama isn't a lone nut in the Democratic Party going to bat for Wall Street, as the Congressional votes clearly shows. Indeed, despite their noted criticisms and mentions of widespread opposition to the bailout, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Christopher Dodd, Diane Feinstein, Barney Frank and, of course, Hillary Clinton all voted for the bailout as well. It's interesting to note that, aside from the already discredited-in-the-establishment-media Dennis Kucinich, the two Democrats who would've had the most to say against the bailout at the start of 2008 were John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer, two men who had their political careers conveniently destroyed by sex scandals this year.

So while the 2008 financial crisis should be remembered as the final nail in the coffin for the miserable failure that is George W. Bush, it may instead be noted as the moment the Democratic Party, under the leadership of a smooth-talking charlatan, removed any pretense of being the party of the common man and instead fully embraced being the party of bankers and Wall Street. As Nouriel Roubini put it: "This is again a case of privatising the gains and socialising the losses; a bail-out and socialism for the rich, the well-connected and Wall Street. And it is a scandal that even Congressional Democrats have fallen for this treasury scam that does little to help millions of distressed, debt-saddled home-owners." Simply put, if the economic crisis of 2008 is the beginning of Great Depression II - and boy, sequels really do suck - then the bailout is like watching the New Deal in reverse, where the federal government is used to soak the public for the benefit of a criminal plutocracy.

In any case, we salute The Wall Street $700 Billion Bailout Swindle (and those behind it) as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, dudes!!!

Beastly Updates:

After the bailout was approved, the stock market continued to dive, even though saving it was one of the supposed reasons for the bailout in the first place. On October 6, 2008, the Dow Jones sunk below 10,000 for the first time in four years, and by Inauguration Day 2009 it was below 8,000, after peaking at over 14,000 in 2007. Meanwhile, unemployment rose over 1.6 million the last three months of 2008, an astounding figure. The unemployment rate as 2008 ended was 7.2 percent.

The projected 2009 budget deficit now isn't $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion - it's $2 trillion, even before Barack Obama's supposed stimulus package. Add that to the picture, and it's an astounding $3 trillion deficit for 2009. Facing this budget crisis, Obama has proposed a "fiscal responsibility summit" for austerity measures on "entitlements" such as Social Security and Medicare. Can't say we didn't warn you...

The good news: the Treasury decided to use the bailout money to purchase preferred stock rather than toxic assets, meaning there is some hope for some return of investment. The bad news: the money has been targeted to bigger banks, leading to even more market consolidation, thus creating more "too big to fail" banks and ensuring further bailouts. Meanwhile, there is heavy suspicion Paulson has chosen winners and losers by settling his own petty vendettas in the process, one decided danger of giving one man unchecked powers.

By the end of 2008, total funds given to Wall Street in various ways was $8.5 trillion, higher than the predicted $5 trillion total cited by Bloomberg in September.

As noted in The Wall Street Journal, the nine biggest banks given $125 billion during 2008 in bailout money owed executives $40 billion. This means nearly a third of the money handed out will be pocketed by wealthy insiders. It the ratio stays the same, the bailout will give over $220 billion to banking executives.

Sources:

Thanks to John "JT" Tully of Broadcatching.wordpress.com for help on this article.

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