Fiting the Filibuster. I sent the following message by feedback form to Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida, who has made headlines of late in relation to healthcare reform. He first became a hero to Liberals with his brilliant denunciation of the Republican health plan as 'If you get sick, die quickly.'

Please increase your attacks upon the insane and antidemocratic processes of the United States Senate. As a member of Congress in a house that does NOT have a filibuster, you should denounce the filibuster as the most insane and preposterous institution in any democracy, at any time in world history. Ridicule the Senate for its stupidity. Demand that the filibuster be abolished so we can get the Nation's business done without dragging Senators out of hospital beds or setting up cots in hallways.
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The Senate's rules must be changed. That should be plain to everyone on Earth, but it is not plain to the Senate. The Senate must be reminded that it does not have the right to run itself by antidemocratic rules, because it was set up by a Constitution that sought to create a DEMOCRACY. Supermajorities were established by the Constitution for only a few things, such as overriding a Presidential veto or amending the Constitution. Absent such a Constitutional requirement, a Senate rule that requires a supermajority for ANYTHING is UNCONSTITUTIONAL. What the Constitution does not expressly permit, it forbids. So the Senate is supposed to operate by majority, not supermajority. Force the abolition of the filibuster, and you will make history as the most important freshman Congressman in the history of this Republic. The Senate seems to think itself a law unto itself, entitled to operate outside and in defiance of the Constitution. Shake them awake.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,350 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:49 AM

 
Obama's Nobel. It has now been 10 days since President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The commentary, much of it critical, that I have heard has focused only on Obama's newness in office and his failure so far to have achieved anything on the international scene. No one seems to have recognized that Obama's singular accomplishment is that he broke — no smashed — the race barrier in the greatest power on Earth. That was not even mentioned in the news coverage on ABC World News, not even by the spokesman for the Nobel Committee. What's wrong with these people?
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In recent years, the Nobel Peace Prize has almost never been awarded for actually promoting peace, much less bringing a peaceful resolution to an armed conflict. It has instead become the Nobel Nice Thing Prize, which praises tree-planting programs and efforts against (nonexistent) man-made global warming and extending credit to the poor. None of these things, nor work for women's rights nor healthcare in poor countries, has anything to do with international peace. The pretense that the award was made in recognition of Obama's change of rhetoric about international cooperation and nuclear nonproliferation is disingenuous at best. What he got the Prize for, and deserved it for, was shattering the glass ceiling on aspirations of "people of color" in the most important and influential country on the planet. This actually does have a bearing on domestic peace, in redirecting the energies of millions of "nonwhite" people, especially young people, from resentment and antisocial behavior into constructive channels.
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Obama has proved beyond contention that the racists are no longer in control, and if young blacks (Hispanics, Asians, etc.) apply themselves to their studies, learn proper English, make plans, set goals, and work intelligently toward those goals, they can achieve great things. That's worth some prize. The Nobel Peace Prize may not be quite the right prize, but to the extent that it influences young blacks (etc.) to stay in school, stop resenting and attacking "whitey", and assume responsibility for themselves and their progeny, maybe it does deserve the Nobel.
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Obama also made a serious, if not definitive, breakthru on campaign finance, diversifying the sources of funding to show that people running for major political office do NOT have to go, hat in hand, to the lobbyists and major corporations, and sell their soul for a campaign contribution. That, too, is worth some prize.
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What Obama showed us, he showed the rest of the world in ... hm ... spades. All those hundreds of millions of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil who were stunned by the triumph of a (half-)black man's becoming President of the United States, and who literally jumped for joy on seeing the news, are a force for good into the indefinite future. 'The United States has overcome the worst of its race problem. There is hope for the world, and our place in it.'
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No matter how badly Obama screws up, in American politics there will be something to the expression, "Once you go black, you don't go back." We have broken the color barrier. We have erased race as the ultimate reservation to the few, the proud, the WASPs. We may not re-elect him. There may not be another successful black candidate for another generation, just as there has not been another Catholic President since Kennedy. But it's now possible, and knowing that it's possible invests blacks more in their country. They really can think, at the birth of a child, "My baby could grow up to be President of the United States. What a country!" Such a father, or mother, is not going to be a bombthrower, and not going to let their kid join a gang, drop out of school, or lie around the house wasting their life away. Obama's greatest value is that he has said to black parents, and to black kids, "No excuses!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,349 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:34 AM

 
Grassley Is Right about the Unconstitutionality of an Individual Mandate. Keith Olbermann poohpoohs Senator Charles Grassley's statement that the Federal Government does not have the right under the Constitution to force people to buy a product, of any kind, from a private company. Olbermann uses the example of car insurance to argue that of course Government has the right to compel people to buy a product from a private company. He is wholly wrong. And even Senator Grassley can be right about something.
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Car insurance and health insurance are in no way comparable. Not everyone drives. Driving is not a right. You have to get a license to drive. But you do not have to have insurance to drive. Only the owner of a vehicle has to have insurance. That is a condition to using a car on a public road, which is a privilege, not a right. I imagine you don't even need insurance to drive on your own property.
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Health insurance is entirely different. Healthcare is not a privilege; it is a right. The only conditions to this bill's mandate is that a person breathe and reside in the United States. That is entirely different. Breathing is a right. Residing in the United States is a right of all citizens. What the individual mandate is really comparable to is this: requiring pedestrians to have automobile insurance, indeed, requiring everyone, from infant to senior citizen, to have automobile insurance so that the rates on auto insurance can be brought lower for people who own cars. Why should pedestrians have to pay for automobile insurance so that drivers can have lower rates? Oh, you could put forward an almost-plausible excuse: pedestrians are involved in accidents with automotive vehicles, so they should have to share in the responsibility for paying for those accidents. Oh, that's fair: run somebody over and make them pay for the costs of the accident too!
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Why should the poor, and young, and healthy have to buy health insurance so that other people's rates are lower? That is indeed unconstitutional, to say that one person should have to pay for someone else's private insurance. Government cannot require people to buy any product or service from any private company just because Government wants them to. Limited government does not have that right. Totalitarian government has that 'right' — if one concedes that totalitarian government exists as of right, something I do not for an instant concede.
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Keith Olbermann and everyone else who says that everyone should be required by Government to have health insurance is 100% wrong. What next? Life insurance? Homeowners or renters insurance? Fire insurance? Flood insurance? A car? A house? A college education? Where does it stop?
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If Government can tell us what we must buy, it can tell us where we must live and what job we must have or education we must complete. There doubtless are people who would argue that this would be a better and stronger country if everyone were required to finish college or a vocational school (and go into debt to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to do so), and buy a house so feel a stake in their community, and on, and on. But Government does not have any right whatsoever to seize control of people's lives and private economic resources and direct them into "approved" purchases, whether people want to make those purchases or not.
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Health insurance takes something and provides nothing to the healthy. That is called "stealing". A scam. A con. A racket. There are many terms for taking money and giving nothing in return, and none of them is anything like "fair".
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The Social Compact. There has developed, in the recent Republican era, a notion that most people are deadweight, a drain on society we would be well rid of. Never mind that we pay our taxes and do our jobs. All that is what we are expected to do, but the only benefit we are to get from our job is what it pays. The importance to society is irrelevant. You've been paid; that's all you're entitled to, is the notion of the day. And it doesn't matter if you are paid $8/hour, while someone who doesn't work nearly as hard, nor as long, nor as smart — if they even work at all — makes $500/hour or $10,000/hour or more. The person who makes $8/hour is only worth $8/hour; the person who makes $500/hour or more is worth that, even if all s/he does is inherit wealth and see interest on it compound every hour of every day.
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The unequal distribution of goods, services, and rights that has developed in the post-1986 world of Reaganomics is now thought of as the highest point the social order has ever achieved. The poor are miserable because they deserve to be miserable. The rich live a life of luxuriant leisure because they deserve it. And there's no such thing as "noblesse oblige" or "richesse oblige". The rich paid for everthing they have, even if the rate at which they "earned" that money bears no relation to effort, skill, or knowledge. We are not to look under the surface at effort or duration of effort, only at the money that fixes the value of things.
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But money does not measure real value, only artificial value. Nurses and teachers make only moderate incomes but stock brokers and professional athletes make a fortune. That's not a fair measure of the contribution different people or occupations make to society.
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There's got to be a better way. Using "time dollars" is one such way. The premise here is that each and every person has only so many hours in the day, and in life. No one has more than 24 hours in a day, tho many people have many more hours of life. Still, this is about as close as we can get to true economic fairness.
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The rich benefit from the work of the poor and middle class. Everything they own was made by people who don't "earn" a lot of money. The rich would be living under leantos made of brush, and sh*tting behind a bush and wiping their ass with leaves if it weren't for "the little people" who built their house and bathroom, made their toilet and toilet paper, installed the plumbing, drove the toilet paper to the store, and on and on — all the myriad little contributions made by "little people" at every step of the way. The rich couldn't make a phone call if there were no telephone instrument, nor cell tower, nor electricity-generating plant, all of them built by "little people". They wouldn't have a car to drive, nor a road to drive it on without the "little people". "I did it all"? No, you stupid rich bastard. You did NOTHING, absolutely nothing, save with the help of literally countless "little people" who built every last thing you used to make "your" money. And it is only OUR name on that money that gives it any value whatsoever. Without our name, without the economy we sustain with our work and spending, "your" "money" wouldn't be more than decorative bits of paper or electronic zeros in a make-believe bank account.
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At end, it's all make-believe. We believe that the "money" we have in paper or electronic numbers will buy things, and as long as other people believe the same thing, everything works. But as soon as people STOP believing that the money is good, it stops having value. And then a wheelbarrowful of paper money won't buy you a single stalk of celery, and all the zeros in the world won't keep the electricity or water flowing. For that, you need the "little people", and if they decide you shouldn't have it, you won't get it. Let's see you then "do it all": grow your own food, generate your own electricity by pedaling a human-powered generator. And you still won't be able to make a fone call or flush your toilet. More to the point, you'll starve long before you can grow your own food — if anyone will even let you have seed with which to do that.
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So the Big People indisputably NEED the Little People. The reverse is not at all true. We don't need billionaires or millionaires. A lot of bosses don't know half what the people on the manufacturing line or in the cube farm know about crucial parts of any enterprise. If every millionaire in the country were to die Monday nite from some mysterious Millionaire's Flu, 99.5% of all the businesses in the Nation would find new leadership before the week was out.
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Let's return to Keith Olbermann and other supposed liberals who take the entirely illiberal, totalitarian approach of saying that Congress is entitled to say that everyone must buy health insurance — from an industry he DESPISES! How on Earth can he say that this would be proper? Health insurers can deny treatments, impose astronomical deductibles and co-pays, but Government would STILL require everyone to buy from this "cartel" — Olbermann's own word! Astounding. We have an evil industry controlled by inhuman monsters who are HAPPY to have people DIE so they can increase their profits, but Olbermann wants to FORCE everyone to buy from them! That is insane.
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Olbermann wants a "public option", but has not said that if there is no public option, people should NOT be required to take health insurance. With or without a public option, Olbermann seems to think, a universal individual mandate is just fine. It violates no fundamental principle of human rights, and Government may — or may not — subsidize the poor, according to a schedule of Government devising. Government would be the sole arbiter of what is "affordable". So if a family is trapped in debt and just barely holding on to their house WITHOUT health insurance, and Government forces them to buy health insurance from this monstrous, evil cartel, and the Government does NOT subsidize them completely but leaves them on the hook for $100, $500, $1,000 a month that they simply cannot afford, it's OK with Olbermann if they lose their house, and have to go on welfare and be housed in a welfare hotel — or live in their car (if it hasn't been repossessed) or on the STREETS because they are too proud to take welfare, or simply don't know how to get welfare.
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There is no such thing as "affordable" health insurance if you are going deeper into debt every month WITHOUT the added burden of health insurance premiums. No such thing. When you have to BORROW $2 just to get to work to pick up your check, there is no such thing as "affordable health insurance". NO SUCH THING. I am soon to turn 65, at which time I will be forced to pay $95 a month out of my Social Security check for Medicare Part B. At present, I have $308.96 after my mortgage payment (which includes property tax and homeowners insurance) for everything else: auto insurance (about $140/month), electricity/gas, water/sewer, phone, oil heat in winter, food, clothing, and every other necessary expense — and forget about entertainment, travel, or any other non-necessity. I cannot cover all my expenses now without dipping into small IRA's. Once $95 is deducted from my check, I will have $213.96 to cover every other expense. Impossible. And if I refuse Part B, I will be PENALIZED and charged a fee for absolutely NOTHING, no benefit of any kind to me. I haven't read all the info on this disgraceful imposition, which is practically contrived to drive the elderly into penury or an early grave. Where is my Federal subsidy? People who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in IRA's, and who get more from Social Security than I do — if you made more during your working life, you get more in Social Security, so economic inequality is perpetuated and even intensified by Social Security — pay the same $95/month. This is the Federal Government's idea of "fairness" in a long-established healthcare program. What the Feds are doing now to low-income seniors, it proposes to do to low-income people of all ages in the future: ruin us, to bring down the cost of healthcare for the rich.
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Since the rich benefit from the work of the poor and middle class, and are paid ridiculous and indefensibly absurd amounts of money on wholly artificial bases, it is only fitting that the rich pay back some of what they owe by paying higher taxes to take care of everyone's healthcare. They can afford it. And that's the most contemptible thing: these bastards have all the money in the world and don't want to take care of the people who made it possible, without whom they would have NOTHING. They couldn't survive for 60 days without the food that other people grew; they couldn't survive for 5 days without the water that other people provide. But they are content to have the people on whom their very lives depend, DIE if they can't afford health insurance.
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Nobody NEEDS more than $5 million a year. Nobody NEEDS 13 houses and 20 cars. There is absolutely no social injustice in Government's simply confiscating 99% of everything over $5 million that anyone makes. That would still leave $10,000 of every million. $4M over a base $5M and the multimillionaire already has more left after tax than the typical American makes before tax. And our super-rich are so obscenely rich that $9M is a pittance to them. What is the point of making more money than you could ever spend on personal needs? We could permit certain expenditures as tax-deductible before figuring 99% income tax on everything above $5M a year, so that legitimate investments in businesses that create jobs or build housing or otherwise advance social purposes would be permitted; and contributions to approved charitable organizations or projects would also be permitted. But idle wealth for the idle rich? No. Government should take it and use it to provide universal healthcare — which would include the rich, mind you — and fund other human needs. Realize, if you will, that all money COMES FROM the Government, so if you think about it, the Government would only be taking back SOME of what it put out to begin with.
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Since beyond a certain point, money is only a way of keeping score, the super-rich can brag about how much money they give to charity and how much tax they pay. That is a better use for money than another Mercedes, Armani suit, or Prada dress. Decent people, if there be any, among the super-rich will be proud to brag that their money built a hospital or saved x number of lives. And the United States would no longer have to hang its head in shame at being the only industrialized country on Earth that does not provide healthcare for all its citizens. Good deal.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,349 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Advising NYC Mayoral Candidate. I mentioned here July 19th that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire Mayor of New York, has spent a fortune in his own money to buy re-election. Only in the past week have I seen any ads for his opponent, Democrat Bill Thompson. Obama today, thru his press secretary, gave Thompson a very weak endorsement, but the same press secretary gave high praise to Michael Bloomberg!
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Thompson's ads are not remotely hard-hitting enuf. So tonite I sent him some advice by feedback form at his website.

Term Limits, Term Limits, TERM LIMITS! You have no chance of overcoming Bloomberg's money and fame unless you hit hard, again and again, as the ONLY issue that matters, Bloomberg's dictatorially overturning TWO referendums on term limits. Remind New Yorkers that they wanted term limits precisely to prevent a "Mayor-for-Life" virtual dictatorship produced by money and name recognition. "Papa Doc" Bloomberg. The people know there are over 8 million people in NYC, and far more than one is qualified to serve as Mayor. The City needs new mayors and councilmembers regularly — out with the old, in with the new — to shake things up and provide new ideas. You must slam all the new proposals Bloomberg pretends to have come up with all of a sudden. If these new projects are so good, why didn't he do them 8 friggin' years ago? Why did it take him 8 years? And what will it take him another 8 years to think of? If he is re-elected in violation of term limits this time, won't he just change the new 3-term limit to 4 terms in four years? then 5 terms, four years thereafter? or do away with term limits altogether? The people don't want a monarchy; they want democracy. Rudy Giuliani abided by term limits. Why won't Bloomberg? TERM LIMITS is the ONLY issue you can win on. If you don't land on it and ride it and run with it over and over again, Bloomberg will drown you in a tsunami of money, and democracy will lose to plutocracy. TERM LIMITS, democracy, plutocracy. These are the only themes that will win the mayoralty for you. And for New Yorkers.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,349 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Email Exchange on Economic Inequities and the Corrupting Influence of Money on Congress. I had an email exchange with a political activist here in Newark, sparked by an email from Michael Moore that he passed along. Moore said, in part:

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. * * *

Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in "Capitalism: A Love Story," I pose a simple question in the movie: "Is capitalism a sin?" I go on to ask, "Would Jesus be a capitalist?" Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1% to have more financial wealth than the 95% under them combined?

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what's left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother's and sister's keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you'd have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

I guess that's bad news for us Americans. Here's how we define "Blessed Are the Poor": We now have the highest unemployment rate since 1983. There's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds. 14,000 people every day lose their health insurance.

At the same time, Wall Street bankers ("Blessed Are the Wealthy"?) are amassing more and more loot -- and they do their best to pay little or no income tax (last year Goldman Sachs' tax rate was a mere 1%!). Would Jesus approve of this? If not, why do we let such an evil system continue? It doesn't seem you can call yourself a Capitalist AND a Christian -- because you cannot love your money AND love your neighbor when you are denying your neighbor the ability to see a doctor just so you can have a better bottom line. That's called "immoral" -- and you are committing a sin when you benefit at the expense of others.

I meant to mention the New Testament's statement, attributed to Jesus by Paul, that "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) but got sidetracked by other things that came to mind. I make up for that oversight now.
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What I actually said is this.

THE saddest part of this whole thing is that it is a recent development, historically speaking. We had progressive taxation from the early 20th Century until 1986, and the distribution of wealth was relatively healthy and benign until the Plutocratic Revolution carried off by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 started destroying everything we had built in the way of social democracy. Now people seem to think that what we have today has always been with us, because a third of the population is too young to have known anything else.
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There are fixes, but the corrupting power of money stands in the way of adopting those fixes. For instance, money is king in Congressional elections because the House of Representatives stopped expanding in 1912, and adopted 435 as some kind of magic number of seats that must be preserved forever. So each year, more and more constituents must be served, and every two years more and more voters must be reached. When a Congressional district had 200,000 people, it didn't cost a fortune to reach them. When it has 700,000 people, however, you have to spend a lot on every election because you have to use mass media and mass mailings. You can't meet even a significant proportion of 700,000 people by speaking in high school auditoriums or senior centers. The incumbent has the advantages that come with incumbency, including name recognition, but still spends hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. Challengers have to spend even more to have any chance of overcoming the advantages of an incumbent. Without equitable public financing and/or spending limits, large districts (and of course Senate races, which are all statewide, are almost all large districts) require vast outlays of money. Getting that money opens people to "campaign-contribution" bribery. The people who buy access and influence don't want public financing that would end their special access and drastically reduce their influence. So we don't get public financing. No public financing leaves Congressmen as beggars from the rich. Beggars can't be choosers as to public policy. They dance with the guy that brung 'em, they do what their funders want them to do, or they lose funding, and possibly their job.
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So, to have any realistic hope of massive change, you must EITHER have smaller districts, by fixing the number of CONSTITUENTS (at, say 300,000 per district, the size of Newark), not seats in the House, so election costs to incumbents are so low that they don't have to take bribes and orders from the rich, and costs to challengers are low enuf to permit much more aggressive contesting of seats; OR you must enact fair public financing (none of this "matching funds" crap, which doubles the inequalities between candidates). Either way could free us from the corruption of money that has contorted the system out of all recognition.
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Absent the removal of money from the equation, there's really nothing you can do short of assassination to get rid of the bribetakers who hide the bribe nature of the money they get by calling it "campaign contributions".
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Christopher Hitchens in a column in London today urged British voters to stay away from the polls next election, because both major (British) parties are arrogant and unresponsive. That's the kind of moronic nonsense we are left with if we don't deal with the structural issues here in the United States. Elections will still be held, even if very few people vote. Smaller numbers produce less representative outcomes. And no one elected will admit that he doesn't have a mandate just because people stay home. Rather, they argue that people who stay home are happy the way things are! Cheers.

He replied:

Spot-on, with your permission I would like to share this with a friend [who] claims to be an ‘Independent”. He ... and I spar on economics and politics all the time.

Naturally I was glad to have him pass that argumentation along. Then I added to it:

By the way, I TWICE had letters published in the NYTimes about expanding the House, decades ago. The second was even illustrated with a cartoon that showed the Capitol dome stretched high; in the version now online, the word "Drawing" substitutes for actual cartoon; I don't see the first letter in early results to a Google search). But nothing has been done. In 1912, the population of the United States was 95.3M, and each year the U.S. grew by about 1.5M. Now the population is 307.2M, and grows by about 2.5M a year. Each Congressional district in 1912 had about 218K constituents; each district today has 706K constituents. People feel they have less power because they DO have less power: each voter today has less than 1/3 the influence on Congress that our grand- or great-grandparents had, and each year our power is diluted further by the refusal of Congress to expand the House. If we had 218,000 constituents per district, we would have to have about 1,400 Representatives, and each Census we would have to add 114 seats. At 500,000, what I advocated in 1990, we'd need 614 [and have to add 50]. At 300,000 per Rep, which would be better than 500,000 in terms of reducing the influence of money, we'd need 1,023 Reps and add 80 after each Census. [Figures have been corrected for 10-year growth of about 25M; originally I unintentionally put in figures for only one-year growth.]
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Most Members don't attend the floor session at any given time, and the British House of Commons chamber won't fit all 646 of its members (94,600 constituents per rep), so the physical size of the U.S. Capitol must not be used as the standard by which the size of the House is measured. Most of the work of Congress is done in committees, scattered thru Congressional office buildings. More members could reduce the number of committees and subcommittees each must participate in, which would allow each Member to become really expert on one or two matters instead of only passingly well informed about 3, 5, or 6. Members can vote electronically from remote locations, by Intranet and Internet. The idea that the physical size of the Capitol Building should control the number of representatives the electorate gets is really absurd, like freezing the size of your pants at age 18 and requiring you to cram yourself into them for the rest of your life.
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I don't care if a joint session of Congress has to be held in a convention center or basketball arena (I saw, in researching this topic today, an organization that advocates an even larger House than I suggest: http://www.thirty-thousand.org/). I care about representative democracy.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,348 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM