Glenn Greenwald: Who Are the Undeserving 'Others'?

Who are those benefiting from expanded government actions?

by Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times' Ross Douthat argues [1], uncontroversially, that the tea-party protests, townhall outbursts and related appendages aren't about specific health care proposals but, instead, are motivated by a more generalized anger over what is happening in Washington:

At the same time, [the health care protests have] become the vessel for a year's worth of anxieties about bailouts, deficits and Beltway incompetence.

This August's town-hall fury wasn't just about the details of health care. Neither were the anti-Obama protests that crowded Washington over the weekend. They were about the Wall Street bailout, the G.M. takeover, the A.I.G. bonuses, and countless smaller examples of middle-income Americans' "playing by the rules," as [GOP pollster Frank] Luntz puts it, "and having someone else benefit."

Notably, Douthat never specifies the identity of this so-called "someone else" who, as a result of government behavior, is unfairly benefiting from the hard work of middle-class Americans, but he gives a clue when he compares current anger over the health care bill to the anger over the 1994 crime bill, which he argues drove Democrats out of, and Newt Gingrich into, Beltway power:

The Public Plan Option and the Big Government Conservatives

Monday 14 September 2009

by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

We all know that there are basic philosophical differences between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe that the government can be used to improve the lives of ordinary people. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the government should redistribute money to the wealthy. This philosophical difference has come through very clearly in the debate over giving people the option to buy into a publicly run health insurance plan.

Since the conservatives are not honest enough to own up to their true principles in this case, it is worth briefly recapping the argument they put up as a cover. The conservatives claim that if people are given the option to buy into a public plan, then so many people will choose to do so, that it will drive the private plans out of business. The country will then be stuck with only a government-run insurer and patients will have no choice. This will be bad news, because the government can't do a good job providing the American people with health insurance.

Obama Banking Too Much On Banks

On Monday—one year after the once-mighty Lehman Brothers collapsed in the nation’s biggest bankruptcy—President Obama addressed the state of the economy and again outlined his proposals for what he calls reform. The location—Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street, near the New York Stock Exchange and New York Federal Reserve Bank—was fitting. George Washington took his presidential oath there, a precursor for how intertwined Washington and Wall Street would become. And Obama’s speech indicates that he’s still making the grave error of mistaking the health of Wall Street for the health of the American economy.

High-quality child care leads to academic success for low-income kids

Boston College professor says high-quality care can negate poverty impact

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (September 15, 2009) – For low income parents, finding high quality child care not only boosts the performance of their children in school, but actually combats the effects of poverty, according to a new study in the journal Child Development.

Children who spent more time in high-quality child care in the first five years of their lives had better reading and math scores in middle school, according to researchers from Boston College, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Samford University, who studied 1,300 middle school students.

PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In

"The drug industry’s trade group plans to roll out a series of television advertisements in coming weeks specifically to support Senator Max Baucus’s health care overhaul proposal, according to an industry official involved in the planning."

via Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been completely out of the loop with the health care story these last week and half or so, out of touch actually with the entire earth (I’ve been on a deadline on another story), but upon returning to work today I began getting calls about some alarming maneuverings in congress. We’re apparently finally seeing delivery of the Big Bribe that President Obama and Rahm Emanuel extracted from that pharmaceutical industry in exchange for dropping drug-pricing reform in the health care bill.

Life Without Bumblebees? It's Not Just Honeybees That Are Mysteriously Dying

By Adam Federman, Earth Island Journal
Posted on September 15, 2009, Printed on September 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142616/

Bombus franklini, a North American bumblebee, was last seen on August 9, 2006. Professor Emeritus Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at UC Davis, was doing survey work on Mt. Ashland in Oregon when he saw a single worker on a flower, Sulphur eriogonum, near the Pacific Crest Trail. He had last seen the bee in 2003, roughly in the same area, where it had once been very common. "August ninth," Thorp says. "I've got that indelibly emblazoned in my mind."

Thorp had been keeping tabs on the species since the late 1960s. In 1998, the US Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management supported an intensive monitoring project to determine whether the bee should be listed as an endangered species, in part because of its narrow endemism. The total range of B. franklini is only 190 miles north to south, from southern Oregon to northern California, and 70 miles east to west between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade Ranges.

US Economy Facing 'Death by a Thousand Cuts': Roubini

The US economy faces a difficult time ahead as consumers stop spending and the fallout escalates from the collapse of the commercial real estate market, economist Nouriel Roubini told CNBC.

Repeating his prediction that the economy faces a threat of a "double-dip" recession and at best a slow-growth U-shaped recovery, Roubini said in a live interview that more banks will fail and residential real estate prices have more room to decline.

New film ‘Earth Days’ takes a sometimes devastating look at the history of environmental activism

In the 1970s, just after the first Earth Day and in the midst of oil shortages, recessions, and uprisings by restless youth, politicians were suddenly expected to show concern for the environment. President Jimmy Carter went above and beyond by installing solar panels on the White House in 1979. Solar panels on the White House!

Seven years later, President Ronald Reagan took them down.

Former NY Gov Spitzer: Regulate the regulators

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who drove a crackdown on Wall Street before being brought down by scandal, said U.S. financial reform should target federal regulators as well as big banks.

"We have not reformed the system," Spitzer told the CBS "Early Show" on Monday. "We still have institutions that are too big to fail, institutions that have received billions ... of taxpayer dollars are not investing that back into the system to create jobs for the future.

"We have a regulatory system that is utterly in disarray."

Glenn Beck and The 9/12 Marchers: Subversives From Within

Who are these people?! Where do they come from?! Ordinary Americans might wonder why anyone would stoop so low as to follow Glenn Beck, Fox News and Dick Armey (and their corporate sponsors masquerading as "FreedomWorks") as they organize their "9/12 March On Washington" to cynically exploit the 9/11 attack.

Patriotic Americans might question the organizer's aim to provide a media forum for dimwitted right wingers to scream "Liar!" "Socialist!" "Antichrist!" "Muslim!" "Death Panels!" "He's not an American!" and so on and on and on about the commander in chief charged with defending us from further attacks. And some people might even cry "shame on you!" to the more mainstream Republicans participating that include Dick Armey of FreedomWorks, as well as GOP Reps. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Mike Pence of Indiana, Tom Price of Georgia, and South Carolina GOP Sen. Jim DeMint.

POWER WITHOUT CREDIBILITY, Part 2: A lost decade ahead

By Henry CK Liu

Part 1: Bogged down at the Fed

The US Federal Reserve faces an intractable problem of unemployment. Non-farm payroll employment in the United States continued to decline in July 2009, with the loss of 247,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.4% for the second consecutive month, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August.

The average monthly job loss for May through July was 331,000 jobs, about half the average decline for November 2008 through April 2009, which lost 645,000 per month. Employment decreased by 117,000 a month on average during that period.

Obama clings to hope as Iran hawks circle

Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - As nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West continue to move slowly, United States President Barack Obama is coming under growing pressure from what appears to be a concerted lobbying and media campaign urging him to act more aggressively to stop Iran's nuclear program.

Obama has given Tehran an end-of-September deadline to respond substantively to his offer of diplomatic engagement. But already hawks in the US - backed by hardline pro-Israel organizations - have pressed him to quickly impose "crippling" economic sanctions against Tehran, and some are arguing that he should make preparations for a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Borlaug, father of Green Revolution, dies at 95

Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, has died at the age of 95.

The acclaimed agriculturalist, often called the father of the Green Revolution, died late on Saturday in Dallas, Texas, due to complications from cancer, according to Texas A&M University, where Borlaug served since 1984.

He was best known for his work developing disease-resistant "dwarf" wheat, which yielded two to three times as much as the normal crop.

Better world: Take Friday off… forever

The four-day week could boost employment, save energy and make us happier.

FANCY a three-day weekend - not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.

The four-day week comes in two flavours. One option is to switch from five 8-hour days to four 10-hour days, meaning overall hours and salaries stay the same. In August 2008, the state of Utah moved all of its employees, apart from the emergency services, to working 4/10, as it has become known. The hope was that by shutting down buildings for an extra day each week, energy bills would be slashed by up to a fifth.

Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman

By Mark Deen and David Tweed

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Joe Wilson and AHIP Team Up to Write Max Baucus’s Health Care Bill

By: Jane Hamsher Friday September 11, 2009 7:06 am

There really doesn't seem to be any limit to what the administration will do to pass Rahm Emanuel's neoliberal giveaway to the insurance industry. The "author" of the plan released by Baucus (and apparently by Mike Ross) is a former VP of Wellpoint. Now AHIP is boasting about their role in crafting it:

Many of the changes to the insurance system now under discussion are the ones that have been advocated this year by the insurance companies themselves, said Karen M. Ignagni, the chief executive of America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group. "The industry has been the leader in creating the proposals everyone is about to endorse," she said.

No wonder insurance company stocks shot up after the President's speech.

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy

Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.

It's not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride.

Frank Rich: Obama's Squandered Summer

THE day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.

After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.

In Praise of Joe Wilson

What's Wrong with Calling Out Liars in Congress?

by Dave Lindorff

Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. "Joe" Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the "dignity of the presidency" by calling out "Liar!" in the middle of President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

But what's wrong with that? Whatever the veracity of Obama's claim that his proposed health care "reform" would not pay for the health care of illegal immigrants residing in the US (and one can only hope that statement was fatuous, because at a minimum we would certainly want the government to pay for the care of an illegal immigrant in childbirth, or of an illegal immigrant who came down with a contagious disease), and even if Rep. Wilson is a racist bozo who wrongly thinks or wants to imply that Obama's plan would be out there enrolling undocumented workers in the millions at taxpayer expense, why shouldn't members of Congress call out a president if they think he's lying to them from the podium?

Democracy and deference

An oldie, but a goody.--Dictynna

By Mark Slouka

I blame my parents, which is trite but traditional. Six years after stepping onto the troubled shore of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s America they had a son and promptly began to fill his head with nonsense. In America, they taught me, talent and hard work were all; allegiance was automatically owed to no one; respect had to be earned. In America, the president worked for us, and knew it, and the house we allowed him to live in for a time—that great white outie of the Republic—was known as The People’s House. Would that I had been suckled by wolves.

Turn on the TV to almost any program with an office in it, and you’ll find a depressingly accurate representation of the “boss culture,” a culture based on an a priori notion of—a devout belief in—inequality. The boss will scowl or humiliate you…because he can, because he’s the boss. And you’ll keep your mouth shut and look contrite, even if you’ve done nothing wrong . . . because, well, because he’s the boss. Because he’s above you. Because he makes more money than you. Because—admit it—he’s more than you.