Croak of the Day Award

To D. Potter, over at Making Light, in response to George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Hager becoming a reporter on Today:

The Satirists & Surrealists Union has collectively thrown up its hands and gone off to slug brick walls. Hurts less.

Croak 100: The Kennedy Option

The great liberal Senator, Edward Kennedy is dead. Kennedy was a tireless supporter of liberal causes. It's not clear why. He was raised rich, and never knew personal need. But he cared about the poor, the weak, and the sick. (As opposed to us corvids, who have a different opinion on the matter.) Kennedy, had he had his choice, would have implemented a single payer national health care system in the USA. As a matter of practical politics, at the end of his life, he advocated the public option. So in honor of Kennedy, following the suggestion of a blogger whose blog I don't quite remember, and in the hope, as always, of changing a few minds: from here on out, I'm going to call the public option the Kennedy Option.

& this is post 100. I'm astonished. I hope a few minds have been changed.

[Title changed from "Post 100" to "Croak 100," because I like it better. Markup corrected to insert paragraphs where I meant to put them.]

That Obama election feeling

I now have the Obama election feeling. We get to fight for the corporate health care bill because the alternative is so awful. Nothing has been promised to progressives, and, probably, nothing will be delivered. I don't want to support Max Baucus and Charles Grassley. I don't want to help them write a health care deform bill. What about you?

To President Obama: on the Conservative Opposition

Do you know the story of how it is that LBJ broke Humphrey in the Senate? It is told in Caro's biography of Johnson. Johnson arranged a humiliating defeat for Humphrey, and Humphrey never challenged Johnson again, even as Vice-President, during the disaster of Vietnam.

I think your former Senate colleagues are trying to do that to you. There is an important difference, of course: you are President. But you still need the Senate, and the Senate is heavily conservative. Like a working House of Lords, the Senate is an organization of the powerful, mostly men, mostly white. Long-term relationships (you know) are formed there. And, as in any aristocratic body, personalities matter.

It looks to me very much like some of your Senate colleagues, who you thought were friends and mentors, were setting you up, pretending to be reasonable and willing to compromise when in fact they were just getting you to stand still while they sharpened the knives. I think you've been betrayed and, with the opposition to your health care proposals now becoming visible, the knives are out.

These men are very skillful liars who have used your rhetoric of reconciliation. You wanted to believe in their integrity and so you did. But your opponents in the financial system and the health care system don't want reconciliation. They want it all, and even when they get everything they want, they want more.

Your choices as President are made on behalf of all Americans and, sometimes, all the world. You have a huge choice before you: you can maintain your connections with your false allies, or you can turn to the people. You cannot reconcile your wealthy, greedy, violent opponents to anything less than unlimited power: if you stay with them, they will sabotage your dream of reconciliation.

However you can reconcile some of the conflicts within the American people.

In my view it is important to discredit the right-wing crazies. They swing the vast majority of independent voters. While in a year or two most of the craziness will be forgotten, and the independents thinking differently, they are affecting the Congress now. I want you to succeed! I think it best to answer these people with incontrovertible truth, and keep on answering them until they are reduced to shouting in dark corners of the media space.

In the public sphere, also, I wish you would reconcile with ideological progressives. They were shut out of your campaign, for whatever reasons. But now you need them, because they're sane people who will support you, and will support your policies if you offer them policies they can support. They are capable of loyalty, something your conservative allies have shown they are not. You cannot make alliances with the swing voters, because the swing voters are easily swung by conservative propaganda sources and you have conservative enemies. But you can make alliances with ideological progressives, because they stand for something, and if you stand for them, they will stand for you.

In the interest-group sphere, I wish you would look out for the big-money groups who are willing to make alliances with the radical right. What we have now is a situation where your seemingly-loyal conservative opponents like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are openly allied with radical groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. These groups in turn have followings of violent radicals, who, like members of lynch mobs, are all too willing to come out when they whistle. The violent radical groups are deserving of some police attention, and so are the radical right groups; people who promote violent tactics have very likely committed crimes themselves. But look back at the seemingly-peaceful opposition, that will not dirty its hands: if the divisiveness is to be stopped, consequences will have to be brought back to them.

I hope you will continue to pursue the dream of reconciliation and change.

On Whole Foods

I think Whole Foods is a fine example of what is wrong with the libertarian theory of market regulation of business. They satisfy their customers (rather fewer of them, now, thanks to the collapse of the middle class) and their investors, at huge costs to their employees, the environment, and ultimately, the world.

To Hel with 'em.

Read about it.

If We're So Smart, Why Ain't We Rich?

A few days ago I asked a union candidate for the Seattle Port Commission, Max Vekich, what there was on the organized left for non-union people. He suggested Working America, which an AFL-CIO outreach organization...in which members don't vote on the leadership. I can join MoveOn.org...in which members don't vote on the leadership. I can join numerous other sort-of leftie organizations...in which members don't on the leadership. I think I detect a pattern here.

Where is there a US leftist organization where members can choose policy and goals and pick the leaders and managers? One that is not, like the old socialist parties, fighting the war not even of the 20th century, but of the 19th. I'd join a modern leftist party, engaged in modern leftist issues, in a trice. I think a lot of people would. And such an organization might even be able to make a real difference in policy.

Health Care & the Revolution

Obama is the sharpest pol to come down the pike in a generation. He's been a Senator, so he knows what the Senate is like. He's from Chicago, so he knows from dirty politics and he was a youthful radical, so he knows what radical politics and activism are like. Yet he gets caught up short.

I suspect Obama, and probably other Democrats, have been double-crossed by the "moderate" conservative leadership. Turns out they're not moderate after all, they just get other people to do their dirty work. The administration trusted big insurance, big pharma, and big medicine to abide by their deals, and not unleash the crazies. & here we are, crazies on parade. It is just like the big financial firms, who have undercut the administration's economic team.

With this near-revolt, the Obama administration and the New Progressives move into a new phase. I wonder what it is going to be like.

BTW, no, I don't think Obama has sold out. A deliberate sellout would not involve a proto-revolution.

[edited a few hours after posting--I like this version better.]