If the GOP Isn't Forced to Vote, They'll Never Learn

If the GOP Isn't Forced to Vote, They'll Never Learn

• Analysis

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Tuesday night Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called a bluff. The question now becomes: Is this a fluke, or a trend in the making?

In a long fight to extend jobless benefits for the almost 9.8 percent of Americans who are unemployed, Republicans have made every effort to slow the process in the Senate. After being presented with crazy amendments addressing some of the GOP's favorite new obsessions such as ACORN, the bank bailout and immigration, Reid basically said, "To hell with it" and called for a cloture vote.

It's about time, and not a second too soon for the growing numbers of unemployed.

Cloture, as many of you know, is a vote to end discussion and move on to a floor vote on the merits of the proposed legislation. It is why those oft-mentioned 60 votes (the number required to come to such a conclusion in the Senate) are so important these days.

The vote on whether to consider HR 3548, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, in the Senate was 87 to 13, moving the bill toward final consideration on the Senate floor. The bill has changed since its original passage in the House last month, so a reconciliation process will be necessary in which the two houses of Congress must agree on a compromise.

Surprisingly, the Senate bill is more generous than the House version. The House voted to extend benefits for 14 weeks only to states with high rates of unemployment (above 8.5 percent), paid for by extending the unemployment taxes already being paid by businesses. But the Senate bill proposes to extend benefits for 14 weeks to all states and for 20 weeks to states with the high unemployment rate of 8.5 percent singled out by the House.

But while Senate Democrats have been working to make the bill more helpful for unemployed citizens, Republicans of that same chamber have been dragging their feet with the help of unrelated amendments.

"Republicans decided to make a political statement by demanding completely irrelevant amendments -- amendments that have little, if anything, to do with unemployment or even the economy generally -- and they decided that the political statement was more important than helping their constituents afford to pay bills," Reid said.

Technorati Tags: Analysis unemployment benefit jobless cloture debate filibuster reid republican senate vote GOP bill health care gov

Posted by "Bear" at 2:37 PM

Glenn Beck Peddles Fake "Populism" for Rich Guys

Glenn Beck Peddles Populism for Rich Guys

By Brad Reed, Commonweal Institute. Posted October 31, 2009.

The Fox News shock jock weaves a tale of wealthy elites who are victims of tyrannical government hell-bent on taking their hard-earned money.

One curious consequence of the Democrats’ electoral triumph last year has been the rise of Glenn Beck, a right-wing populist whose daily ravings on Fox News have helped inspire the anti-government “tea party” rallies across the country. In a lot of ways, Beck’s popularity reflects the current emotional state of American conservatives.

When they ran the entire government just a few short years ago, it was fashionable for conservatives to tune into braying, overconfident bullies such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Now that they’re totally shut out, however, they’ve found solace in the conspiratorial and weepy Beck, who stokes their fears that shadowy elements within the government are plotting to end freedom as we know it.

The irony is that Beck is only really opposed to big government when Republicans aren’t controlling it. For instance, he has no issues with allowing the government to torture prisoners and is supportive of police brutality. And those big government bailouts of the financial industry that Beck rails against on a regular basis? Back when George W. Bush was president, Beck actually chided Congress for not giving more money to rescue the banks.

So Beck isn’t against big government. Rather, he’s opposed to government action that helps the poor at the expense of the rich. For instance, have you ever seen a conservative oppose tax cuts in any form? Well, Glenn Beck does, but only if they’re being given to poor people. Indeed, when economist Jeff Frankel appeared on Beck’s show to advocate giving tax cuts “to low-income, working Americans,” Beck compared him to Josef Stalin and accused him of trying to “redistribute the wealth.”

In his own way, Beck is tapping into the American tradition of rich-guy populism where wealthy elites portray themselves as noble victims of a tyrannical government hell-bent on taking their hard-earned money and giving it to unworthy poor people. Novelist Ayn Rand is primarily responsible for creating the modern incarnation of rich-guy populism, as her books portrayed productive capitalists pitched in a constant struggle against governments, unions and other organizations that inhibited their ability to have a limitless income. In Rand’s calculus, one was either a “rational being” motivated by one’s own self-interest to be productive and make money; or a “suicidal animal” who only survived by sponging off the work of the producers. Rand was fond of describing such “unproductive” people as “looters” and “parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man.”

You can see how Beck incorporates this mindset into his daily diatribes against the government. The most telling example of this came during the summer when Beck compared the current effort to reform health care to giving reparations to the descendants of slaves. In his standard conspiratorial fare, Beck said that the purpose of health care reform wasn’t to give more Americans access to affordable, quality health care, but to act as a slush fund to reward racial minorities. Although Beck adds a toxic racial element to the equation, his basic framework is straight out of Ayn Rand: the government is using its power to take money away from productive people and to give it to unworthy parasites.

Although this sort of phony populism is absurd on its face, it has been used effectively for decades to wage a siege war against progressive government policies. The tactics vary, but the common strategy is to persuade the rest of the American people to support legislation that only benefits the very richest.

Take for example the debate over the inheritance tax, which until 2001 was only paid by the wealthiest two percent of Americans. For years now, rich-guy populists have successfully rebranded it as the “death tax” and have portrayed it as a nationwide scourge that is bankrupting small family farms.

Sadly, then, rich-guy populism has become a staple of American political discourse. Progressives who design and implement policy can do themselves a favor if they simply anticipate that whatever they propose is going to attacked as violating the rights of the rich, who in the right-wing’s view have become America’s most deeply oppressed minority.

See more stories tagged with: populism, beck

Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently at Sadly, No!. This article was produced as part of Commonweal Institute's Progressive Op-Ed Program.

Even Tea Baggers Deserve Healthcare, too

Even Dolts Deserve Healthcare, too

by Mark Drolette / October 30th, 2009

Normally, I avoid visiting my sister Apolitica at all costs. Not because of her, but because of her husband, Dolton, a dyed-in-the-fool right-winger.

But they’d had a second child recently, so I visited their tiny apartment to offer congratulations. It was the polite thing to do. (That, and Mom threatened to cut me from the will if I didn’t.)

Dolton sat on a rent-a-sofa in his cramped front room, cradling his newborn daughter.

“I’m so happy for you two,” I lied. Dolton toiled at three part-time jobs; none provided benefits. My sister is disabled and can’t work. They’ve had everything from appliances to vehicles repossessed. Sooo… what to do?

Have another kid! Sigh.

“Dolton, Jr., just loves his new baby sister,” my brother-in-law said, gesturing to his ten-year-old nearby. “Don’t you, little Dolt?”

My nephew winced. The kid was no dummy. Someday I’d have to ask Apolitica who the real father was.

“So,” I ventured, “what’s the new one’s name?”

“Dimina.”

“You mean,” I said, gasping, “she’s going to be… a little Dim?”

“You got it!” Dolt said, beaming.

And some people never will, I thought, glancing towards Apolitica. She dashed into the kitchen. Coward.

From the rent-a-tube in the corner, Bill O’Liely railed against healthcare reform.

“Obama and his damn socialism!” Dolton fumed. “He and that commie Congress’ll bleed America dry.”

It took me a moment to roll my tongue back into my mouth. Finally, I managed: “It’s especially tragic given how well our economy had, thus far, survived two needless wars, tax cuts for the mega-rich and trillions shoveled to criminals who sabotaged the economy.”

“Spew actual facts if you want,” Dolt growled, “but if Obamacare passes, mark my word: soon there’ll be a hammer-and-pickle on every flag.”

The only pickle I could visualize was the one my sister and her husband were in. They’d just received the bill from the county hospital for Dimina’s birth and, without healthcare, bankruptcy was imminent.

“Dolt,” I said, “you slave away and yet you’re still destitute, and now your medical bills will break you. How could you possibly be against affordable healthcare for you, your family and 47 million other uncovered Americans?”

“Because,” he spat, “socialized medicine is un-American!”

Dimina wailed. I could relate.

“Don’t buy the lie,” I pleaded. “Polls show a huge majority of Americans want healthcare for all, and most also know that single-payer is the only real solution. Which, incidentally, is not socialized medicine, but socialized insurance.”

“I’m against socializing. Period.”

Well, so was I — at least with my brother-in-law. Inexplicably, I pressed forward. Why did lemmings come to mind?

“Don’t get hung up on pejoratives,” I urged, thinking of all the ways the extreme right has sullied once-perfectly respectable terms in recent years.

“Then how’re we supposed to buy food that doesn’t rot?”

“Excuse me?”

“Without pejoratives, food spoils. Everybody knows that,” Dolton declared triumphantly.

“I believe,” I said slowly as I wondered what I’d ever had against disinheritance, “you may be thinking of preservatives, which is what they’ll be dipping my brain in in a few hours after I donate my body to science immediately after leaving your place.”

“Ha!” he snorted. “There won’t be any donating needed once you liberals get your death panels in place.”

“They already exist.”

“Huh?”

“Death panels. They already exist. Except they’re usually called ‘insurance companies.’”

“Whaddya mean?” Dolt asked, seemingly genuinely perplexed. (Well, OK, so he always seemed genuinely perplexed.)

“C’mon, Dolt,” I said, “surely even you can see those vultures spare no effort denying as many claims as possible which, once they’re done inventing exclusions and ‘pre-exiting conditions,’ translates into untold real suffering and, not infrequently, death.”

“Hnh,” Dolt snorted. “Why do you lefties hate the free market so much?”

“You mean the ‘free market’ that the insurance companies rig with millions of dollars in bribes, sorry, campaign contributions, and industry-written legislation that best serve, hmm, let’s see, the insurance companies?”

“There you go again with your precious details,” Dolt sneered. “Listen, Mark, government-run healthcare will put an industry out of business, and that’s about as hippo-pinkie as it gets.”

“Then you should love the bogus Baucus bill. Mandatory insurance for everyone, and fines for non-conformers? How delightful — for the insurance companies.”

My brother-in-law was silent. He’d either died, or was thinking. (Barring precedent, it had to be the former.) Cautiously, I continued:

“Dolt, let me ask you something: Are you more interested in the well-being of insurance companies, or tens of millions of your fellow citizens? Because here’s the deal: the sole function of the former is to further line the pockets of shareholders and CEOs by skimming up to thirty percent of a money pool that, were it to populate a single-payer system, could nearly all be applied toward providing excellent health coverage for every American.”

“I don’t want the government choosing my doctor!” he cried.

I wondered how I could’ve missed the moment I crossed into the parallel universe.

“Dolton,” I said quietly, “you don’t have a doctor.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

I simply had to find out where the next Masochists Anonymous meeting was. Solidly cementing my qualifications for membership, I ventured on:

“Listen, Dolt, under single-payer, government simply handles the billing. Period. Current private investors are bought out, then hospitals become non-profit and receive annual payments for expansion and operational expenses. The government owns nothing, thereby debunking that ‘socialized medicine’ hooey. And, you choose your own physician.”

“I’m sure,” Dolton snarled, “doctors and nurses will love working for peanuts, which is all that’ll be left once the government starts handling all the dough in your fallopian world.”

Being in a fallopian world sounded pretty utopian at the moment.

“Hardly. Having the paperwork done by just one not-for-profit entity with low overhead — Medicare only spends about three percent on administration — instead of by numerous profit-sucking, bottom line corporations, not only frees up enough money to provide affordable, quality universal healthcare but also ensures doctors and nurses are well-compensated. It’s a no-brainer [thus making it right up your alley, I didn’t say].”

Dimina squalled. My sister came in swiftly and whisked her up. “She’s been running a fever,” Apolitica explained worriedly as she hurried to the bathroom.

“Yeah, she’s been feeling pretty crummy lately,” Dolt said, looking a little far off. (I mean, more than usual.) He was obviously concerned. I had to admit: for all his faults, Dolton was a loving father.

From the TV, xenophobia burbled: beware medical services-stealing immigrants, warned Glen Blecch.

“Handouts to illegals goes a long way toward making this country sick!” Dolt parroted.

I had to admit this, too: my brother-in-law was a bonehead.

“No,” I sighed, “what really makes this country sick is its sickness, in every way. We Americans pay by far the most for healthcare, yet rank miserably down the list in every major healthiness indicator. And as far as the expediency of denying medical services to undocumented aliens, you might want to think twice about that the next time you read about a tuberculosis outbreak in a farm labor camp or a meat-packing plant.”

“I don’t read.”

Imagine my shock.

“I don’t need the liberal media telling me how lucky we are to have a Marxist president making America more communist everyday,” he ranted. “What happened to good old American self-sufficiency? Why do people think the government owes them handouts? How come — ”

“Dolt!” It was Apolitica, entering from the hallway, carrying her bawling daughter. “Dimina’s temperature has shot up to 106. I told you we should have taken her in yesterday. We have to go the emergency room NOW!”

“But…baby — we can’t even pay the other bill we have.”

“NOW!” Apolitica repeated, already out the door with her ailing infant.

Dolton snatched his keys from the rent-a-table. “How did this happen?” he moaned.

Was there a rent-a-mirror around?

Mark Drolette writes in Sacramento, California. He can be reached at: mdrolette@comcast.net. Read other articles by Mark, or visit Mark's website.

This article was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Health/Medical, Humor, Socialism.

Uninterrupted, sustainable economic growth is impossible

Impossibleism

by Aetius Romulous / October 30th, 2009

Uninterrupted, sustainable economic growth is impossible. Those who support it are “Impossibleists”. They practice, preach, and defend to the death at times, “Impossibleism”. It is a universal phenomenon, practiced across economic, political, cultural, and social spectrums around the globe. Impossibleism is an umbrella philosophy that captures the insanity of any system that is completely unsustainable and obviously so, but charges forward regardless. Systemic insanity, if you will.

We are all living at the thin sharp point of always more, always bigger, always better, always new, improved and disposable. That much should be obvious, even though it is not. We want our homes to be worth more today than yesterday, we demand it to be so. Prices must always fall, wages must always rise, and our wealth must always increase. We must have more than our parents and we must ensure more again for our children. Standing still is failure. Going backwards is unthinkable. This is simply impossible to sustain, we all know it, but we carry on regardless. Impossibleism.

It’s a math problem, or more correctly, it is our collective ignorance of natural forces, and the tyranny of arithmetic behind them. In our civilized hubris, certainty is something malleable, something which we can and will in time conquer. A war on 2+2=4. The inevitable as the enemy. Invisible, exponential terrorists whose design it is to take away our cherished free markets, destroy our twin towers of freedom and democracy, and bust us all back to the dark ages before cars, coke, and plasma TV’s. Absolutely nobody alive today wants that.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), world output “collapsed” by 1.1% in 2009. That data point the official manifestation of what everybody already knew — that our world was in trouble and we were living with less. The value (in US dollars) of everything produced on our small blue planet in 2009 was about 60 trillion dollars — give or take a fish in Indonesia or the occasional bribe in Saudi Arabia. The American GDP is about 14 trillion dollars, where a ham sandwich is about five bucks — for purposes of scale. A contraction in production was both cause and effect of a serious economic “meltdown”, one which has squeezed our societies and cultures in fundamental and dramatic ways. It was, and is, a catastrophe. 1.1 % it turns out, is a lot.

The IMF forecast for 2010 is much rosier, as they predict a “return to growth” of about 3.1%. The consensus is that this is a good thing of course, growth being the only acceptable state of affairs, and by any measure. Absolutely nobody wants contracting production of stuff, nor do they want piddling increments of same. No, we all alive today want increasing production of stuff and nothing less, Amen. The only caution the IMF reserves is that our recovery is weak, and we must all be on our guard lest it slip back or sideways. And again, Amen to that.

In fact, it won’t be long before we just simply assume, as we had before, that growth is the natural order of things and forget completely the lessons of the great economic collapse. We will expect that growth is constant, and pay no heed to the annual IMF reports, just so much wallpaper in their dull, never changing prognosticating. A constant line of 2% growth our just reward for taming the earth and making it our own. Sustainable growth as many economists say, sustainable in the “we can keep this sucker moving” kind of way, not in the antithetic “can we keep this up?” heretical kind of way.

So we have a 60 trillion dollar world and it isn’t good enough it appears. We want a bigger world, a better world, and 2% a year should give it to us. That’s 2% compounded of course — we want our 2 % added to our current amount of stuff, and we want this to happen every 365 times the earth rotates on its axis — per annum, once a year. In 2010, we will be expecting to produce about 1.8 trillion dollars worth of “wealth” above and beyond the 60 trillion we have now (my apologies to economists who normally demand footnotes and qualifiers for this kind of thing. You get the point regardless). Maybe another 1.2 trillion or so the year after. We couldn’t be happier when our world GDP grows to 63 trillion USD’s in just two years. Good, sustainable progress we all can believe in, the effects of which we intuitively know will make us all healthier, happier, and richer. A lot of us anyway, or at least those of us who matter.

What is a 63 trillion dollar world going to look like? More jobs, more cars, more I Pods and I Phones. More people perhaps, more food we would expect, more industries and factories and technology. More of everything: poverty, stress, and Hollywood plastic. Three trillion doesn’t seem much against sixty, and it seems manageable. Certainly compared to a 120 trillion dollar world, which would be twice the amount of productivity we are churning out today. It’s much harder to imagine that. Spend a day out in the workaday world we all inhabit, and we can see what 60 trillion dollars looks like. Spend the same day trying to picture a 120 trillion dollar world… and it confounds the senses.

Of course, it is easy to forget that our current world is powered by the resources of the planet, and once reminded it makes for perfect common sense. More cars, industry, and flip flops require more coal, iron, and oil. It is reasonable to consider that a 3 trillion dollar increase in production worldwide will require additional stuff dug, scraped, or pumped out of the ground. This is concerning to many, as there is common understanding that raping the earth is morally and ethically to be avoided. We do it anyway of course, depending on our children to figure out a way to fix the imbalance for us. But a 120 trillion dollar world? Twice the oil pumped at twice the rate, twice the fish killed at twice the rate, twice the consumption with twice the debt. What about a 240 trillion dollar world? Four times the wealth, based on four times the resources our current world is built upon. Four times the rate and amount of extraction and consumption of oil than today. 85 billion barrels of oil in 2008, 340 billion barrels of oil consumed every day in a 240 trillion dollar world. And rising by design.

Impossible.

Impossibleists want unrestrained sustainable growth in the face of its inevitable impossibility. It is a mystery how they think this way, knowing as they surely do that eventually the bill will come due, and the engine will run out of gas — literally. Think about it — growth that never stops, ever. Even with limitless resources, it is simple intuition that eventually, somewhere, sometime…. But of course we don’t have infinite resources, another intuitive understanding even though it seems to us every day that we do. We know we don’t. Impossibleists will not reconcile these two basic intuitions, that all growth must eventually end, and that all resources must eventually tap out.

Impossibleism is a form of insanity, a shared delusional neurosis. It’s a party game of trick or treat all humans are invited to, a game where treats are redeemed by us in the present, and tricks are reserved for the ghosts of future people we will not know, and of whom we do not care. Not our children, nor theirs. The legacy of Impossibleism is the certain destruction of the future, the hope of the Impossibleist that he will not have to face the damned.

Pop quiz. How long will it take, at 2% annual growth compounded, to turn our 60 trillion dollar world into a 120 trillion dollar world? 35 years. If we do exactly what we plan to do, and everything goes swimmingly, and we have sustainable growth of 2% a year, our children will have a 120 trillion dollar world to deal with, and most of us alive today will live to see it. Children today of ten years of age will be alive and drowning in a 240 trillion dollar world, which by deliberate and calculated design will arrive in a single lifetime of 70 years. It’s a tyrannical feature of unflinching math called “doubling time”, a feature of exponential growth hidden in plain view.

The future ghosts are not just real, they are alive today and are our very own children. We have met — and love, and cherish, and protect — the very people we are cashing in the chits on, on whom we are knocking out the jams. Think about it, we are nurturing the very people — people who carry our names, our genes, and paradoxically our dreams — who will watch and live in and deal with a world four times larger than our own. We ourselves will breathe our last on a small blue planet that has to produce twice as much as today’s planet.

Progress, as we all define it, is impossible to sustain. Why? Leave the dogmas, politics, and bullshit aside and do the math. That’s why.

Impossibleism.

Aetius Romulous writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution. Read other articles by Aetius, or visit Aetius's website.

This article was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Economy/Economics, General

Medicare makes it difficult to report real fraud. I know. I've reported obvious fraud many times and as a former SHIP/SHINE counselor, most seniors are discouraged from doing it because no one listens or cares. ~BEAR

Published on Sunday, November 1, 2009 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

Loose With Numbers: Medicare Fraud Report a Fiction

by Pierre Tristam

I haven't watched CBS' "60 Minutes" in years. But it was one of those stories that stops you in your tracks: Medicare fraud is "a $60 billion crime." Medicare is the $456 billion government health insurance program serving 46 million elderly Americans. Its credibility as a government-run program is at the heart of the health-care reform debate. If Medicare isn't doing the job, the government certainly can't.

Except that the fraud claim is not true. "60 Minutes"' amateurish journalism wouldn't get past your average small-town copy editor's fact-checking.

The first thing I did after watching the show was get in a big funk: Maybe conservatives are right. Government can't run anything. And this is "60 Minutes," not some tabloid sap like "Dateline." The second thing I did was apply the first lesson of the trade: verify the facts. It didn't take long for the story to unravel. There are no facts. "60 Minutes" doesn't know how much Medicare fraud there is. You don't know. I don't know. The federal government doesn't know. Nobody knows, because Medicare fraud as a whole isn't tracked. That's why "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft said fraud is "estimated now to total about $60 billion a year." Estimated. Fine. By whom? You'd think Ed Murrow's ghost at the Columbia Broadcasting System might still compel his descendants to attribute colossal estimates to a reliable source. Not this time.

I called "60 Minutes." I asked to speak to one of the two producers of the segment. I was patched through to a spokesman instead, who said the $60 billion figure came from Kirk Ogrosky, a Justice Department prosecutor in charge of Medicare fraud. But it didn't. Nowhere in the "60 Minutes" broadcast or its written report does Ogrosky mention the figure. Nor is the figure attributed to him or Attorney General Eric Holder, who makes a cameo on the show. The spokesman's best explanation: Ogrosky was cited in the piece, "60 Minutes" got the figure from him, and the Justice Department didn't call the next day to dispute the figure (as if the Obama administration were going to start a credibility war with yet another network). I was welcome, the spokesman said, to check with Ogrosky's office at Justice.

I did, asking if Ogrosky or anyone at the department had given "60 Minutes" that $60 billion figure, and if it stood by it. After cutting through the initial bureaucratic hurdle, Charles Miller, one of the Department of Justice's spokesman, wrote me: "This sounds like a good question for HHS," meaning the federal Department of Health and Human Services. I let Charles know the buck-passing was getting old. He tracked down Ian McCaleb, the spokesman for the department's criminal division, who worked with "60 Minutes" on the segment. McCaleb's answer: "The estimate range in the Attorney General's Q and A was $27 to $90 billion, but that is using National Healthcare Anti-Fraud Association and General Accounting Office estimates on total federal expenditures."

McCaleb and the attorney general were wrong, too. GAO has never estimated total Medicare fraud. It investigates targeted programs within Medicare, finding fraud in the millions, not billions. And it's not total federal expenditure that those estimates McCaleb referred to are based on. It's total public and private expenditure on health care. The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a partnership between private insurers and the federal government, says that it "estimates conservatively that 3 percent of all health care spending -- or $68 billion -- is lost to health care fraud." The association bases that figure on 2007 total health care spending of $2.27 trillion in the United States. It's an unscientific, very dubious way of making estimates. But even if you go with it, well over half that spending is private sector. Medicare in 2007 was a $436 billion program. Applying the association's 3 percent standard, that works out to an estimated $13 billion in Medicare fraud. For argument's sake, throw in Medicaid's $191 billion spending in 2007. You're up to $19 billion in fraud.

Steve Kroft and his producers never bothered to trace their facts to the source for viewers, relying instead on the slob-journalist's cheapest cop-out: attribution by estimates. Nor did they make the equally important point: Insurance fraud isn't unique to Medicare or government-run programs. If anything, it affects the private sector more. Shame on "60 Minutes" and the Justice Department for throwing around wild numbers. Those are the numbers -- the fictions -- shaping public opinion across the country and public policy in Washington.

Medicare fraud is a serious problem. But singling it out and exaggerating it beyond credibility won't fix it, although it may help doom any government expansion of health care. In that regard, the "60 Minutes" segment did its death-panel best.

© 2009 News-Journal Corporation

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net or through his personal Web site at www.pierretristam.com .

6 Marriage Myths Shattered: How Barack and Michelle Shun Fairy Tale Romance

6 Marriage Myths Shattered: How Barack and Michelle Shun Fairy Tale Romance

By Vanessa Richmond, AlterNet. Posted October 31, 2009.

The first couple's imperfect union helps shed light on the reality of marriage.

How much romance did early American farmers expect? After they'd milked the cows and tilled the fields and put the kids to bed, did they hope to exchange a few pleasant words from time to time, have sex once in a while, and occasionally stay up to watch the embers fade to black before falling asleep? Did they expect much more than a colleague with benefits?

Or did they believe, that "Love is a magical journey," and that getting married meant they were "about to embark on a wonderful voyage," as Disney promises on its wedding site.

Did they expect that love would fulfill their every need, that they would never again be lonely, that if they found someone who was compatible that their every dream would come true, effort-free?

I didn't live 200 years ago, but I venture they didn't. And though I can't prove it, I venture most were happier as a result. The cultural machine that pumps out stories about love and relationships, that raises our hopes and expectations beyond what is humanly possible, creates little other than heartbreak.

Love and marriage stories, "true" or not, are largely fiction. But they're so compelling, and so commonplace, and, to quote the X-Files, people "want to believe" that they seem true. Or at least possible.

Reality shows often depict the systematic hunt for the perfect mate who is 100 percent scientifically compatible. Romance novels, which still hold the largest share of the consumer book market, are pumped full of entertaining but formulaic fantasy – usually about the dopamine-fueled days of falling in love with no mention of what it looks like to drag yourself out of bed when you both have the flu but someone has to feed the kid who is crying.

And magazine and newspaper stories about "real" peoples' "real" love, which tend to be the most-read stories in any issue (like this week in the New York Times), tend to bear a striking resemblance to all other fairy tales with very little resemblance to reality.

First comes love, then comes marriage. And a giant, booming wedding industry exists to sell the perfect wedding, one that all but offers a lifetime guarantee.

Go figure that there will be an estimated 2,326,485 weddings this year, at an average cost of $30,860, (which is up despite the recession) with a total market value of $71,795,327.

There are almost half as many divorces, meaning the divorce rate is between 40 percent and 49 percent (maybe a higher than average rate when you're taken to your wedding in Cinderella's carriage and Mickey Mouse marries you. But I digress).

These stories are powerful. I'm taken in by them myself, despite my best efforts at critical thinking. Although I know they're pumped full of hype and lies and silicone, and I put my best filters on, I can't help but absorb tiny morsels of mistruth from "true" love stories about "real" people. I find myself comparing my own relationship to the fiction, mulling over the differences and similarities.

So even though I'm sure the profile of the first marriage in this weekend's NYT Magazine "The Obamas' Marriage" is PR-spun, prepped, practiced and signed-off on, it's as fictional as any other celebrity love story -- be it the Jolie-Pitt's or the Bushes' -- I found myself devouring the whole thing and feeling a little less bloated by the junk-food feeling than usual.

I don't know how much of it is an unfiltered view into the living room of another couple's (white) house, and it's still an example of a now idealized relationship that's already become part of the story, but this portrait is more flawed than the usual tale.

I know it's a savvy move to portray their marriage like this since it reinforces their brand as being based on honesty and transparence (the image of the Bush marriage, in contrast, namely that they were seamlessly happy, was as much a blatant lie as others told by the administration).

As for why they agreed to sit for hours of interviews about their marriage at all, Michelle Obama says, "If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realize that good marriages take work ..." The image of a flawless relationship is "the last thing that we want to project," she said. "It's unfair to the institution of marriage, and it's unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn't exist."

And PR-spun and brand-enhancing though it may be, it still throws a wrench in some of the biggest wheels of the monstrous love machine.

Here are six myths about love and marriage debunked by the Obamas' marriage profile.

1. If you're in love, your dreams will all come true.

Michelle Obama clearly had one idea about what her marriage would be: that she would fall in love, have kids and raise them with her partner. But she talks in the piece about how things did not go according to those plans, and how she struggled with that but came to terms with it.

"After she became a mother in 1998, she was tempted to stay home, but like many political spouses, she felt financial pressure to work [because Barack's career didn't pay much]. "Michelle would say, 'Well, you're gone all the time, and we're broke?' the president recalled when I spoke to the two of them. " 'How is that a good deal?' "

She and Barack, in fact, lived in different cities. And when she went to interview for a job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, her baby sitter canceled at the last moment, so she showed up with Sasha in a stroller.

" 'She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,' recalls Susan Sher, who became her boss at the hospital and is now her chief of staff."

2. If you're truly compatible, you agree on everything.

The NYT writer asked how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president. The president responded:

" 'My staff worries a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think,' he finally said, to laughter around the room."

Then Michelle contradicts him: " 'Clearly, Barack's career decisions are leading us. They're not mine; that's obvious. I'm married to the president of the United States. I don't have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that -- you can't even measure that.' "

It's my favourite moment in the piece, because she doesn't let him get away with glossing over things, even when that might be expected. Kate Harding from Jezebel wrote, "Can I just tell you how much I love that Michelle doesn't let him get away with turning it all into a joke? (Especially a hoary old, "Oh, really, my wife's the one with all the power!" joke. For fuck's sake, you're the president of the United States. That joke is annoying when regular guys make it to avoid directly addressing the actual inequality in their marriages, and off-the-charts annoying when you do it.)

3. When you are married, you become one person.

Remember in Anna Karenina, when Levin says of his wife, Kitty, that there's no point getting mad at your wife because it's like getting mad at yourself, since you're like one person? In psychobabble, that's called "co-dependence," and it's bad news for mental and relationship health, but somehow it is sometimes synonymous with true love.

(A psychologist friend told me what we're supposed to aim for is "interdependence," which is when each person has an independent life, but shares some parts of their life.) But sometimes, not even that is possible, and you kind of have to suck it up for a while and be totally independent, which isn't as much fun, in order to get to be interdependent again.

When Barack Obama "retreated" to Bali to write the manuscript for Dreams From My Father, then remained preoccupied with it after his return, Michelle was quite unhappy.

"A friend told her, 'Barack doesn't belong to you.' "

So Michelle basically developed a totally independent life. They haven't actually lived together consistently since their first daughter was a toddler, and she didn't like that, but they made it work.

4. To have a good relationship, you should always be supportive of your spouse's plans, especially in public.

When Barack told Michelle that he wanted to run for a Senate seat, when they lived in Chicago and had young kids, she wasn't pleased. They had friends and colleagues over at their house, and though he wanted her support, it was clear everyone was gung-ho except her.

" 'I married you because you're cute, and you're smart,' Michelle later said she told her husband, 'but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do.' "

And she didn't keep quiet about her frustration. "Unlike the wife who smiles tightly and insists everything is fine, Michelle sent a clear series of distress signals not only to her husband but to everyone around her.

" 'Barack and I, we're doing a lot of talking,' she would say when asked how she was holding up, according to the Rev. Alison Boden, a former colleague at the University of Chicago … more than a few Chicagoans knew that Michelle once openly resented what her husband's political career had cost her."

5. All you need is love … and each other.

There's lots of talk about how raising a kid takes a village, but somehow there's the idea that if you're in love, you just need each other. It's total crap.

Michelle Obama talks about how she'd accepted she wasn't going to have a conventional marriage, but it was still hard to deal with the fact that her husband was away most of the time. In order to get through it, she said she had to realized that their lives would never fit that "certain type of model." But that she couldn't do everything alone with him away.

"I just needed the support. It didn't have to be Barack," she said. She saw friends a lot, socially. And as for raising the kids, "Michelle's mother, Marian Robinson, offered crucial help, often picking up Malia and Sasha after school. The Obamas' closest friends -- doctors, lawyers, MBA types -- also faced the strains of two-full-time-careers-plus-kids marriage. Now they banded into a kind of intergenerational urban kibbutz, a collective that shared meals and carpools and weekend activities."

6. When you find true love, you sail off into the sunset in clear waters.

Guess what? True love and compatibility are nice and everything, but they don't mean everything will be easy. "The bumps happen to everybody all the time, and they are continuous," the first lady said, discussing the "lowest point in her marriage."

" 'Marriage is hard,' the first lady said with a little laugh. 'But going into it, no one ever tells you that. They just tell you, 'Do you love him?' 'What's the dress look like?' "

It seems most true love stories leave a few details out.

Tyee Contributing Editor Vanessa Richmond writes the Schlock and Awe column about popular culture and the media. She is also the former managing editor of the Tyee.

Tortured Memories and the Culture of War

Tortured Memories and the Culture of War

Sunday 01 November 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

(Artwork: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

This article is drawn from Henry A. Giroux's forthcoming book, "Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror" (Paradigm Publishers, 2010).

For the last decade, we have lived through a historical period in which the United States relinquished its tenuous claim to democracy. The frames through which democracy apprehends the lives of others as human beings worthy of respect, dignity and human rights were sacrificed to a mode of politics and culture that simply became an extension of war, both at home and abroad. At home the punishing state increasingly replaced the welfare state, however ill-conceived, as more and more individuals and groups were now treated as disposable populations, undeserving of those safety nets and basic protections that provide the conditions for living with a sense of security and dignity. Under such conditions, basic social supports were replaced by an increase in the production of prisons, the expansion of the criminal justice system into everyday life, and the further erosion of crucial civil liberties. Shared responsibilities gave way to shared fears and the only distinction that seems to resonate in the culture was between friends and patriots, on the one hand, and dissenters and enemies on the other. State violence not only became acceptable, it was normalized as the government spied on its citizens, suspended the right of habeas corpus, sanctioned police brutality against those who questioned state power, relied on the state-secrets privilege to hide its crimes, and increasingly reduced those public spheres that were designed to protect children to containment centers and warehouses that modeled themselves after prisons. Fear both altered the landscape of democratic rights and values and dehumanized a population increasingly willing to look the other way as large segments of the population were either dehumanized, incarcerated or simply treated as disposable. The dire consequences can be seen every day as the media report a stream of tragic stories about decent people losing their homes, more and more young people being incarcerated and increasing numbers of people living in their cars, on the streets or in tent cities. The New York Times offers up a front-page story about young people leaving their recession-ridden families in order to live on the street, often surviving by selling their bodies for money. Reports surface in the dominant media about unspeakable horrors being inflicted on children tortured in the "death chambers" of Iraq, Cuba and Afghanistan. And the American public barely blinks.

The Bush administration further eroded a culture inspired by democratic values, replacing it with a culture of war. During the last decade, the language and ghostly shadow of war became all-embracing, not only eroding the distinction between war and peace, but putting into play a public pedagogy in which every aspect of the culture was shaped by militarized knowledge, values and ideals. From video games and Hollywood films aided by the Department of Defense to the ongoing militarization of public and higher education, the notion of the common good was subordinated to a military metaphysics, war-like values and the dictates of the national security state. War was no longer the last resort of a state intent on defending its territory; it morphed into a new form of public pedagogy - a type of cultural war machine - designed to shape and lead the society. War became the foundation for a politics that employed military language, concepts and policing relations to address problems far beyond the familiar terrains of battle. In some cases, war was so aestheticized by the dominant media that it resembled an advertisement for a tourist industry. The upshot is that the meaning of war was rhetorically, visually and materially expanded to name, legitimate and wage battles against social problems involving drugs, poverty and our newfound enemy, Mexican immigrants.

As war became normalized as the central function of power and politics, it became a regular and normative element of American society, legitimated by a state of exception and emergency that became permanent rather than temporary. As the production of violence reached beyond traditionally defined enemies and threats, the state now took aim at terrorism, shifting its register of power by waging war on a concept, broadening its pursuits, tactics and strategies against no specific state, army, soldiers or location. The enemy was omnipresent, all the more difficult to root out and all the more convenient for expanding the tactics of surveillance, the culture of fear and the resources of violence. War was now a commonplace feature of American domestic and foreign policy, engaged in a battle that had no definitive end and demanded the constant use of violence.

It is difficult to imagine how any democracy could not be corrupted when war becomes the foundation of politics. Any democracy that makes war and state violence the organizing principle of society cannot survive for long, at least as a democratic entity. The country descended into a period in which society was increasingly organized through the production of both symbolic and material violence. A culture of cruelty emerged in the media, especially in the talk radio circuit, in which a sordid nationalism merged with a hyper-militarism and masculinity that scorned not merely reason but all those who fit into the stereotype of other, which appeared to include everyone who was not white and Christian. Dialogue, reason and thoughtfulness slowly disappeared from the public realm as every encounter was framed within circles of certainty, staged as a fight to the death. As the civic and moral center of the country disappeared under the Bush administration, the language of the marketplace provided the only referent for understanding the obligations of citizenship and global responsibility, undeterred by a growing war machine and culture that produced jobs and goods and furthered the war economy.

The war abroad entered a new phase with the release of photos of detainees being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. War as organized violence was stripped of its noble aims and delusional goal of promoting democracy and revealed state violence at its most degrading and dehumanizing moment. State power had become an instrument of torture, ripping into the flesh of human beings, raping women and most abominably torturing children. Democracy had become a shell that not only defended the unthinkable, but inflicted the most horrible mutilations on both adults and children deemed to be the enemies of democracy. But the mutilations were also inflicted against the body politic as politicians such as former Vice President Dick Cheney defended torture while the media addressed the question of torture not as a violation of democratic principles or human rights but as a strategy that may or may not produce concrete information. The utilitarian arguments used to defend a market-driven economy that only recognizes cost-benefit analyses had now reached their logical end point as similar arguments were now used to defend torture, even when it involved children. The pretense of democracy was stripped bare as it was revealed over and over again that the United States had become a torture state, aligning itself with infamous dictatorships such as those in Argentina and Chile during the 1970's. The United States government under the Bush administration had finally arrived at a point where the metaphysics of war, organized violence and state terrorism prevented them from recognizing how much they were emulating the very acts of terrorism they claimed to be fighting. The circle had now been completed as the warfare state had been transformed into a torture state. Everything became permissible both at home and abroad just as the legal system along with the market system legitimated a punishing and ruthless mode of economic Darwinism that viewed morality if not democracy itself as a weakness to be either scorned or ignored. Self-regulation now drove the market and narrowly defined individual interests set the parameters of what was possible. The public collapsed into the private and social responsibility was reduced to the arbitrary desires of the hermetic, asocial self. Not surprisingly, the inhuman and degrading not only entered public discourse and shaped the debate about war, state violence and human rights abuses, but served to legitimate such practices. Torture was normalized and the promise of an aspiring democracy was irreparably damaged.

The United States under the Bush administration embarked on a war on terror that not only defended torture as a matter of official policy, but furthered conditions for the emergence of a culture of cruelty that profoundly altered the political and moral landscape of the country. As torture became normalized under the Bush administration, it not only corrupted American ideals and political culture, it also passed over to the dark side in sanctioning the unimaginable and unspeakable - the torture of children. While the rise of the torture state has been a subject of intense controversy, too little has been said by intellectuals, academics, artists, writers, parents and politicians about how state violence under the Bush administration set in motion a public pedagogy and political culture that not only legitimated the systemic torture of children, but did so with the complicity of a dominant media that either denied such practices or simply ignored them. The focus on children here is deliberate because young people provide a powerful referent for not only the long-term consequences of social policies, if not the future itself, but also because they offer a crucial index to measure the moral and democratic values of a nation. Children are the heartbeat of politics because they speak to the best of its possibilities and promises and yet they have in the last few years become the vanishing point of moral debate, either irrelevant because of their age, discounted because they are largely viewed as commodities, or scorned because they are considered a threat to adult society.

I have written in "Youth in a Suspect Society" that how we educate our youth is connected to the collective future we hope for. Actually, how we educate youth became meaningless as a moral issue under the Bush administration, because youth were not only devalued and considered unworthy of a decent life and future (one reason they were denied adequate health care), they were reduced to the status of the inhuman and depraved and subjected to cruel acts of torture in sites that were as illegal as they were barbaric. In this instance, youth became the negation of not only politics but also the future itself. But more is at stake here than making such crimes visible; there is also the moral and political imperative of raising serious questions about the challenges the Obama administration must address in light of this shameful period in American history, especially if it wants to reverse such policies and make a claim on restoring any vestige of American democracy. Of course, when a country makes torture legal and extends the disciplinary mechanisms of pain, humiliation and suffering to children, it suggests that far too many people looked away while this was happening and in doing so allowed conditions to emerge that made the unspeakable act of justifying the torture of children a matter of state policy. It is time for Americans to face up to these crimes and engage in a national dialogue about the political, economic, educational and social conditions that allowed such a dark period to emerge in American history and to hold those responsible accountable for such acts. The Obama administration is under fire for its embrace of many of Bush's policies, but what is most disturbing is its willingness to make war, secrecy and the suspension of civil liberties a central feature of its own policies. Obama, in his desire to look ahead, recycles a dangerous form of historical and social amnesia and overlooks the political and civic pathology he inherited. Memory at its best is unsettling and sometimes even dangerous in its call for individuals to become moral and political witnesses, to take risks, to embrace history not merely as a critique, but as a warning about how fragile democracy is and what will often happen when the principles, ideals and elements of the culture that sustain it are allowed to slip away, overtaken by forces that embrace death rather than life, fear rather than hope, insularity rather than solidarity. Robert Hass, the American poet, has suggested that the job of education, its political job, "is to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time." Justice is slipping away, once again, under the Obama administration, but it is not just the government's job to keep it from "going dead," it is also our job - as parents, citizens, individual, and educators - not merely as a matter of social obligation or moral responsibility, but as an act of politics, agency and possibility.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. This article is drawn from Henry A. Giroux's forthcoming book, "Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror" (Paradigm Publishers, 2010). Also forthcoming "Politics After Hope: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy," (Paradigm Publishers, January 2010). His homepage is www.henryagiroux.com.