The Broad View

Broken record

In less than three days, Obama will be giving another of his make-or-break speeches. Once again, he'll be trying (and, I expect, failing) to redefine the health reform debate that has careened so far out of reason or control. On the Sunday gasbag shows, White House officials prepared the way -- for another round of insipid boilerplate and equivocation. From the NYTimes:

Three days before President Obama is to address a joint session of Congress about overhauling the health care system, administration officials on Sunday continued to characterize a new government program for the nation’s 50 million uninsured as worthwhile but not essential to legislation.

David Axelrod, a White House senior adviser, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Mr. Obama “believes the public option is a good tool.” But Mr. Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health-care debate.”

Oh no, the public option certainly doesn't define the whole debate. The right-wing whackjobs have taken care of that and now it's insane conspiracy theories about commie-fascist death panels and withholding health care from Republicans that drive the "debate".

The White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” sidestepped questions on whether Mr. Obama still regarded the so-called public option as a necessity for any bill he would back.

“We’re trying to provide choice and competition for individuals and small business owners,” Mr. Gibbs said when asked if the public option was “essential.”

“The president strongly believes we need to provide choice and competition,” he said. Pressed on whether Mr. Obama would demand that a government insurance program be included in legislation, Mr. Gibbs said that it could be a “valuable component” of any health plan. And asked whether the president would reject a plan that did not include government insurance, Mr. Gibbs responded: “We are not going to prejudge where the process will be.”

[...]

And The Associated Press reported that on a call with prominent liberal House members Friday, Mr. Obama refused to be pinned down.

In his talk-show appearance, Mr. Gibbs said, however, that Mr. Obama will clarify his position in his address to Congress and is considering broadly outlining his own legislation instead of letting Congress set the terms.

It's nauseating. Just fucking make up your mind, already. Stand for something, dammit. I have this nightmare vision of getting to 2012 with a president that has spent the last four years refusing to be "pinned down" about anything of importance.

The endless parroting -- "choice and competition," "competition and choice," blah, blah, blah. What does that mean, exactly? That's right: Nothing. There hasn't been one component of actual reform (versus insignificant tinkering at the edges) that Obama hasn't supported, then "indicated" he'd trade away, and back and forth, yes, no or maybe, ad infinitum.

Are we supposed to cheer that Obama might propose an actual plan? It beggars the imagination that this "clarification" will be any less nebulous than his statements thus far when the latest trial balloon is floated using words like "considering" and "broadly outlining." If he truly wants to "clarify" this clusterfuck, he'll ditch everything and start over by first reading the riot act to the Senate Democrats and then taking a tire iron to their future electoral ambitions.

That won't happen, though. We'll probably get another mealy-mouthed paean to bipartisanship, competition and choice along with heart-felt thanks for the cooperation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in fashioning this historic legislation. Feh.

An aside: Not only have I called and emailed the White House, I mailed an ink-and-paper letter to the president in which I promised that he will lose my vote if a fully competitive public option is not passed. Late last month, I received a reply. It's a canned response, brimming with bland boilerplate. The letter includes this line:

There are tough choices to be made, and I will bring businesses and workers, health care providers and patients, and Democrats and Republicans together to create a system that delivers better care and puts the Nation on a much sounder long-term fiscal path.

I am then urged to "learn more about [Obama's] agenda" online. The letter ends with this:

I share the sense of urgency that millions of Americans have voiced. I watched as my ailing mother struggled with stacks of insurance forms in the last moments of her life. This is not who we are as a Nation; together, we will fix it.

Sorry, but Obama's language and tone are so dispassionate, so dry, so brittle, that the merest gust of Teabagger bullshit can easily shatter his narrative -- and that's exactly what's been happening.

Americans are dying because they can't get or afford health insurance. Americans in the hundreds of thousands are facing medical bankruptcy even with insurance. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies are posting the biggest profits on record and they're lavishing millions in salaries and bonuses on their executives while children are denied life-saving treatments. How can these fuckers be winning?

I know Obama is a cool customer. However, if he wants to change the scorched landscape of American health care, he had better get angry --  very angry and very soon. This is a life-and-death debate and Obama's got to man up and fight. Get in touch with your lizard-brain, man.

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

Afghanistan Outpost

Our endless floundering in the Afghan quagmire is finally commanding some attention. Miraculously, it's taken only eight years for the American public to realize that something is gravely amiss with our Central Asian Adventure. In his latest NYTimes column, Bob Herbert compares Obama's escalation in Afghanistan to Johnson's in Vietnam and concludes that both presidents listened to the wrong advisors:

President Obama is being told (as Lyndon Johnson was told about Vietnam) that more resources will do the trick in Afghanistan — more troops, more materiel, more money.

Supporters of the war offer an array of rationales in a way that reminds me of Bush's constantly mutating excuses for the Iraq invasion: Every explanation carefully avoids the real, bedrock motivation for our occupation of a hostile country.

After all the huffing and puffing about Iraq's imaginary WMD, Saddam's imaginary ties to al Qaeda, Saddam's insanity, the regime's cruelty and oppression, establishing viral democracy in the region and more, the real reason for our invasion of Iraq was as obvious as it was unspoken.

When Dick Cheney pored over maps of the Iraqi oil fields with petroleum company executives during the secret meetings of his Energy Task Force, all was clear. When our military forces in Baghdad guarded the Oil Ministry while ignoring the looting at the National Museum, it was clear that file cabinets were vital security objectives but the priceless heritage of early civilization was expendable. Securing the Iraqi oil fields was our strategic objective in the first resource war of the 21st century and establishing massive permanent bases and a friendly puppet government was how we'd do it.

Afghanistan started differently. We had legitimate objectives at first --  the capture of bin Laden and the destruction of al Qaeda's network of training camps and safe havens in the country. Once we'd botched that, the stage was set for what we have now -- a prolonged and ineffectual occupation in an increasingly hostile environment. Nevertheless, we're establishing massive bases and protecting a puppet government that, more and more, is unfriendly.

So why are we still there? Of course, we're saving face. God forbid that we have to tuck our tails between our legs and accept ignoble retreat, defeated by a bunch of violent country bumpkins in a repeat of the Soviet debacle. But again, mostly bogus excuses abound. We're saving the Afghanis from the oppressive Taliban, whether or not they want to be saved. We're watering the seeds of democracy in Central Asia, despite propping up a rampantly corrupt regime with no support outside Kabul. We're fighting the scourge of opium, even though the poppy fields are once again blooming abundantly after a hiatus under the Taliban. (Interestingly, the Taliban originally banned opium production under Sharia law, but now they embrace the trade as a way to raise both cash and allies in the countryside.)

Afghanistan looks like a dry hole in terms of our strategic interests, yet Obama is doubling down. Perhaps the answer lies next door. Our bases in Afghanistan are the launchpads for invasion should events take a very bad turn in Pakistan. I can't imagine any other reason to put the spurs to this conflict.

Bush made a precedent of "pre-emptive" war in Iraq and now Obama seems to agree that it's a good idea in Afghanistan. Thus we're drawn deeper and deeper into both real and potential conflicts in countries and cultures where our understanding is shallow at best. And nobody talks about it.

We persist in believing that we must police the entire globe through the vast network of military outposts we've established and pay for with money that might otherwise be used for universal health care, investment in modern infrastructure, R&D in energy, medicine, climate control and more. Will we ever, as a nation, grow up?

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

The Reaper Chronicles

Every aspect of the health insurance "debate" makes me purple with rage. This morning's AP story quotes Sibelius' claim that the wretched Obama is willing to drop the public option in favor of the useless co-op nonsense.

There are no words to describe my complete disgust with Obama and the rest of the Washington Democrats. Their gutless incompetence has in all likelihood doomed real health insurance reform for another generation. Actually, a humane, civilized health care system is probably impossible in the U.S., given our hostility to doing anything to help our fellow citizens -- especially those who aren't white -- and the opposition of a loud, easily manipulated plurality of stupid Americans. Yes, there is a significant percentage of American citizens who are proudly ignorant, gullible dolts. These are the kind of people who give Democracy a bad name.

The Rabid Right's latest cri de coeur -- "Obama Death Panels" -- has been scooped up and amplified by an equally stupid and irresponsible media class. So far, Obama has been singularly ineffective in countering the hysteria. As Maureen Dowd writes in today's NYTimes:

Sarahcuda [Sarah Palin] knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one.

Okay, here's a visceral response to the idiotic notion that Obama will pull the plug on Grandma. Here's the story of a real Grandma, my husband's Grandma.(All names have been changed.)

Louise had metastatic cancer. She had survived breast cancer many years earlier but now, in her eighties, the cancer had returned. One bout of chemotherapy was enough to convince her that she didn't want to spend what was left of her life enduring painful torture. I think it was the right decision. She lasted another two years and was relatively healthy until the last three or four months. The "cure" would probably have killed her far more quickly by weakening her with poison and pain. And it is those last three or four months that concern us now.

Harry, my husband's grandfather and Louise's husband, was in his mid-eighties. He was amazingly vigorous and sharp as a tack, but old age had amplified his peculiarities. He was a miser and a hoarder. And he was totally paranoid about having strangers come into his home. That, in itself, wasn't unreasonable. The elderly have good reason to feel vulnerable to strangers. As his wife's health deteriorated, however, he insisted on coping with caring for her by himself and then, when he could no longer lift her to change her soiled bedding, he enlisted his daughter Joanne's help. My husband's mother was well into her sixties and not in great shape herself.

The combination of ignorance and despair was determinative. Joanne called me one day to ask, amazingly, for my advice. She didn't know what to do, how to proceed, how to handle an increasingly untenable situation. Her stubborn, paranoid father refused to allow anyone into the house -- no nurses, no home health workers, not even Meals on Wheels.

I advised that she convince Harry that he must allow her to have professional help. At no point, I said, should she allow her father to hospitalize Louise. I told her that once her mother was in the hospital, her agony would be prolonged. She would have the tubes inserted, the machines hooked up, and she'd be kept alive as long as possible, in misery. I advised her to contact someone about home hospice care.

All Louise needed at that point was to be kept clean and comfortable. At home, she could spend her last days with family in familiar surroundings with a view of her lovely garden outside.

Harry was an autocrat and would have nothing of it. Joanne, even in her sixties, was still a cowed and impotent child when facing her father. So Louise was taken to the large hospital nearby. She was hooked up to a feeding tube, IVs and monitors. Her view out the window was of a brick wall.

Louise spent the last forty-two days of her life on her back in that hospital. No one asked about alternatives. Standard operating procedure was to prolong her life through any and all means.

There's also a dirty little secret that nobody in this health care "debate" talks about: Doctors are paid by the procedure and there's nothing like a helpless, elderly patient for the opportunity to pile on the tests and procedures. During a patient's last days in the hospital, doctors come out of the woodwork to peek in the door, glance at a chart, order an expensive test, and walk out to bill Medicare accordingly.

When Louise wasn't staring out the window in pain, she was being hauled all over the hospital for tests and x-rays for -- what, exactly? There was no question that she had terminal disease and that the end was very near. Did they think this blood test or that x-ray would tell them something they didn't already know? Did they expect to predict the exact day and hour of her death?

So for forty-two days, Louise was mindlessly kept alive while her body was being eaten to death by the cancer. Her bones had become so fragile that some time in the last week her hip broke merely from lying in the bed. Her guts had turned to putrid goo. Finally, she died.

The hospital bill was, of course, stratospheric. Miserly Harry didn't care, though. Medicare picked up most of it and what they didn't cover, supplemental insurance did. And it was all totally, utterly unnecessary. Harry was rich enough that he could have paid for round-the-clock nursing at home. There would have been no feeding tube, no monitors, no IVs. Louise would have died weeks sooner, in her own bedroom, and been spared what passes for "care" in America's modern hospital system.

But no one in a position of authority spoke up. Louise wasn't given the chance to choose her own fate. Every day in the hospital, she begged to go home. Instead, she had a husband more concerned with money and his own paranoia, a willfully ignorant man happy to have someone take the problem off of his hands for free. She was left to a system that has perverted its mandate for mercy into a soulless, hypocritical exercise in milking the helpless for every penny that can be squeezed from Medicare.

So don't talk to me about "Obama's Death Panels." Don't talk to me about "pulling the plug on Grandma." Don't pretend to care about people when all you care about is demagoguing and demonizing humane health care reform to score political points.

I'm in despair that any real reform will ever be enacted. I'm sick of a country informed by brutality and stupidity. I wonder what all those imbecilic "Town Hell" screamers would be screaming if they found themselves in Louise's hospital bed.

(Cross-posted at The Followspot.)

Comply, or else

I've been meaning to write something about this post from Glenn Greenwald on the surreal news that Army troops will be deployed here in the U.S. for, among other things, crowd control in what seems to be a direct violation of Posse Comitatus. An Army Times article has some of the details. This is when the water gets hot enough to truly boil us frogs.

However, I couldn't do better than to direct you to Digby's extraordinary addition to the discussion:

So men who've been fighting in Iraq will now be armed with tasers on the streets of the United States. You can be fairly sure that after what they've been trained for they'll believe that tasering someone is completely benign. After all, you get up again.

But as bad as putting more tasers on the streets, there's an even worse possibility.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

I think you have to wonder if this is what they might be talking about:

The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.

Called the Active Denial System, it projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling. [...]

It can penetrate clothes, suddenly heating up the skin of anyone in its path to 50C.

But it penetrates the skin only to a tiny depth - enough to cause discomfort but no lasting harm, according to the military.

A Reuters journalist who volunteered to be shot with the beam described the sensation as similar to a blast from a very hot oven - too painful to bear without diving for cover.

But that's not all! Raytheon is also developing a "non-lethal" weapon for the Army -- "Silent Guardian." Here's a description Digby found on Silent Guardian's effectiveness:

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury.

But anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I've just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn't bear thinking about. [...]

Silent Guardian is supposed to be the 21st century equivalent of tear gas or water cannon - a way of getting crowds to disperse quickly and with minimum harm. Its potential is obvious. [...]

This machine has the ability to inflict limitless, unbearable pain.

What makes it OK, says Raytheon, is that the pain stops as soon as you are out of the beam or the machine is turned off.

And still that's not all. Read about the Pulsed Energy Projectile weapon, designed to raise bubbles of superhot gas on the skin of people up to a mile and a half away. This is the stuff of conspiracy thrillers and bad sci-fi movies of authoritarian dystopias run amok.

There has never been a weapon invented (outside of some WMD) that hasn't been used. And the supposed "non-lethality" of these weapons assures that they'll be used in "crowd control," i.e., dispersing political protesters. "Free speech zones" aren't nearly as satisfactory as zapping the fucking hippy traitor bastards.

And if you get trampled to death in the stampede, or your eyes get permanently burned by superheated contact lenses, or your pacemaker goes haywire -- well, that just serves you right for hating America. That'll teach all you malcontents to stay at home and STFU.

This is America in the 21st Century. Paid for by our tax dollars. Who will stop this madness and how?

Happy Entrails to You, Until We Meet Again

I can't pretend to know more than the barest basics about the workings of Wall St. finance. Like millions of middle class economic simpletons, I have a 401K that is the backbone of my retirement savings. It's in very risk-averse money market funds with a chunk in international equities. My timing is always lousy, so I just gave up trying to figure when to get in or out of domestic equities. I missed plenty of upside action and settled for piddly returns in exchange for being able to sleep at night. I have been afraid to look at it since the start of our trip down this 1930s Memory Lane. Thank God I have no debt and live in an established (300+ years) town, not a sprawl development.

Can anyone question why economics has been dubbed "The Dismal Science"? I've been reading news and opinion, on blogs and newspapers, and listening to political and economic pundits on cable news. I'm now quite sure that nobody knows what's going to happen, how to handle it, or where or when we'll reach bottom.

If these guys were reading chicken entrails or throwing bones in magic circles, they'd make as much or more sense. To confound us further, each pinstriped shaman divines a different message from the same scattered entrails of the American economy.

Paulson is running around (if he had any hair, it would be on fire) crying that something big must be done, and done quickly. But what? Consensus seems to be building around buying "trash for cash," as Krugman describes it, but how much cash, at what asset valuations and with what -- if any -- oversight? And really, just exactly how bad are things? What is the evidence? Why won't an interim measure suffice until a new administration is in office? 

These aren't easy questions to answer but as usual, the administration has allowed a situation to go critical and tried to use the opportunity to make another irrevocable power grab. Paulson and Bernanke have dug in their heels and made dire predictions of ruination if their entire plan -- including total discretion with no oversight or legal recourse and swollen asset valuations -- isn't immediately adopted. It's another rape of the middle class to shovel our money at the undeserving and incompetent rich.

Added to this writhing mess are some truly disgusting politics. As Digby explains, McCain and the Republicans are maneuvering to cast themselves as guardians of the taxpayers' wallets and populist mavericks against a Bush-sponsored Wall St. bailout.

McCain announced today that he's suspending his campaign to rush back to Washington to address the financial crisis. He's calling on Obama to do the same, as well as postpone Friday's debate. Pure theatrics. Please spare us the bromides about "Country First."

It's all too clear that "Country First" is the cruelest bit of irony to come from any Republican's mouth. Again, from Digby:

Marci Wheeler catches an interesting little aside in today's Roll Call article about the latest White house meddling... er management, of King Henry's snow job:

Hidden in an article reporting that Cheney's going to go hunt up some support for the $700,000,000,000 bailout is this admission that the Bush Administration has been sitting on it for some time:

Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough. [my emphasis]

If the Bush administration has been formulating this plan for months and never breathing a word to lawmakers about it, then there is a much bigger story here than we know. This is being presented as a response to an unpredictable crisis. If that's not the case then perhaps some of the conspiracy theories that are floating around are actually true.

This is all truly horrible. Horrible. I can only look at the tv, slack-jawed and aghast. I see my life savings melting away, the value of my home dwindling, and the cost of everything inflating obscenely. Now we're poised to indenture generations of Americans for debts that boggle the mind. One thing is sure: If those who are in power and those who lined their pockets all this time aren't made to pay -- and pay dearly -- the rage of the people will not be contained. There won't be an offshore haven anywhere on earth that's far enough away. No gated community will protect these human locusts. They'd best be making plans to decamp to Pluto.

Some of the stuff I've been reading:

• Why Congress Should Oppose the Bail-out Package, from Bonddad on DKos;
• Andrew Leonard's posts in "How the World Works" on Salon.com;
• Paul Krugman's columns and blog;
• Three Times is Enemy Action, an accounting of how we got here, by Devilstower on DKos;
• A profile of Dr. Nouriel Roubini -- "Dr. Doom" -- in the Aug. 17 issue of The New York Times Magazine;
• The Way Forward, a typically runic post on DKos by Stirling Newberry;
• and a special treat (so to speak): Things Become More Serious, a post by Billmon (!) on DKos. Yes, he's ba-a-ack....

 

It's the end of the world as we know it...

... and I don't feel fine. I feel queasy.

If anyone was wondering what issue would galvanize the electorate this time around, today's events erase all doubt. Is there any middle class person with a 401K or stock investments or a house who isn't nearing panic as he watches a lifetime of asset building get torn down dollar by dollar, day by day.

Wall Street is melting down today, and Main Street knows it can't avoid the storm. "Big Shitpile" (© Atrios) will not be contained and the toxic cloud it's spawned has wiped out Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch. The Dow Jones opened 300 points lower and the European exchanges are even worse.

This isn't academic. It's visceral. And it's now Obama's job to tie this disaster directly to Bush-onomics and its biggest fan, John McCain. McCain's camp is already out there with this ad:

"Our economy is in crisis," the narrator says before declaring: "Only proven reformers John McCain and Sarah Palin can fix it. Tougher rules on Wall Street to protect your life savings. No special-interest giveaways. Lower taxes to create new jobs. Offshore drilling to reduce gas prices. McCain-Palin. Leadership, experience, for the change we need."

The Republicans, who in large part created this crisis, will hammer the public repeatedly with these lies until the average idiot 'Murican believes every word.

There's more to the story of what we're seeing, though. Truth be told, greed and tunnel vision aren't wholly-owned by the Republicans. The dismantling of the regulatory regime that allowed a shadow banking system to arise -- a system that operated for decades with scant oversight to check its lunatic excesses -- was endorsed by Democrats too.

Why? Because the Democrats were afraid of being tarred with all the usual right-wing labels. Because the rapacious Republicans tirelessly sold their ideology of unfettered capitalism and the pipedream that any slob can get rich if he votes Republican. But ultimately, we're here because Democrats forgot how to be Democrats.

The Times' Floyd Norris is liveblogging today's action. Before dawn he had this to say:

Those who were complaining, only months ago, that excessive regulation was making American markets uncompetitive, had it exactly wrong. It was a lack of regulation of the shadow financial system and its players that allowed this to happen. The regulators might not have gotten it right if they had tried to put limits on leverage, or assure that it was clear what risks were being taken, in the world of derivatives and securitizations. But deciding not to even try, and assuming that risks traded secretly would somehow end up in the hands of those most able to bear them, reflected ideology, not analysis.

Andrew Leonard, who writes Salon's "How the World Works" column, was equally blunt:

Tracking Monday's developments alone will be a full-time job for the entire global financial press. But as we wait for Monday's opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, let us remind ourselves, once again, of the most important lesson that economists, investors and voters should be taking from this carnage.

Over the past three decades Wall Street sought, and received, a climate of deregulation and minimal oversight that allowed it to create new markets at will, permitted investment banks and commercial banks to commingle their activities, and exempted critical new innovative financial products from any meaningful government restraint.

Now, we are staring at the kind of mess you get when you give 2-year-olds a few buckets of paint and tell the baby-sitter to take the day off. Cleanup is going to be a bitch.

Shocking death in Arkansas

During the Clark campaign I subscribed to the e-mail list of the Arkansas Democratic Party, and I've never unsubscribed. Thus did Bill Gwatney's name (and face) pop up on my computer screen with regularity. And most of the time I actually read the ADP newsletter. I liked its style. I liked that it connected me in some intimate way with the political folk who had the back of Clark, and of the Clintons. Even though I didn't know him, I liked Bill Gwatney.

The news of his murder is a real shocker.

There is an insanity abroad in the land...

Update: I just received an e-mail from the ADP about Gwatney's death. The online version of it is here.