Do Something Real, Mr. President

A letter to the President, as requested by the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Dear President Obama,

We can use American ingenuity to end our dangerous dependence on oil. The Union of Concerned Scientists has developed a strong, comprehensive, science-based plan that can cut our projected oil use in half by 2030. Taking this step would keep billions of dollars in our economy, cut pollution, and protect our coasts from devastating oil spills. You can see the full plan here: www.ucsusa.org/OilSavingsPlan.


You were elected by Democrats and Independents, Mr. President. People who have wage-earning Americans' interests at heart, not capitalized investors in gated communities. Do something for people who work for a living, and do something to save this planet from a scourge of mass extinctions and economic displacement that will render the lives of future generation much less joyful and much less hopeful.

You must persuade members of Congress to put American citizens, and the planet ahead of their own parochial desire for reelection, and actually do so something real to obtain our energy supply from sustainable, renewable, domestic sources. Stop saying nice things, and then delivering watered down Potemkin plans. Do something real! That's why we elected you.

Thanks.

A Conversation With VP Biden on Trade

Senator Hollings, you nailed all the high notes with your commentary on the Huffington Post. Thanks for your insight and persistence. I wish voters could catch your drift and quit buying into this business about free-markets and free trade.

Since May, I've been working way too much (a blessing) to read your posts, but I'm catching up now.

I have to quote a few key sections of your post, so they appear on my blog...they need emphasis.

"After adopting a seal, the first bill to pass the Congress in its history on July 4, 1789, was a protectionist tariff. And we financed and built these United States into an industrial power with "protectionism." We didn't pass the income tax until 1913. In 1900 the colony was richer than the Mother Country by $25 billion and had a GDP double the GDP of Germany and Russia combined, causing Teddy Roosevelt to exclaim: 'Thank God I'm not a Free Trader.'"

"The Obama Administration says the solution for jobs is educate, educate. We in South Carolina need a lot more education, but we have enough to create jobs -- producing the "ultimate driving machine" for BMW and the most advanced aircraft, the "Dreamliner," for Boeing. It's Washington that needs education."

And yes, bring on the VAT to promote domestic industry and exports.

Now, they're blaming President Obama for being anti-business and for not paying down deficits. He should eliminate the corporate tax and replace it with a 2% VAT. This will make him pro-business; bring in more revenues to pay down deficits, and promote exports. The vote in the Senate against McCain's VAT was an increase in taxes. The corporate tax beginning at 39% averages at 27%. A 2% VAT cuts corporate taxes for production 25%. And please call it for a vote. Now! Don't worry about a filibuster. Any voting against a 2% VAT to replace the corporate tax will be voting against the major reason to off-shore jobs; be voting against jobs; against cutting taxes; against promoting exports, against paying down the deficit, and against business. 

All truth, as far as I can tell. Why can't truth ever get traction in the morass of our political and media environment?

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

While GM Brags About Its Comeback, Auto Workers Go Begging

Articles in the New York Times (Detroit Goes From Gloom to Economic Bright Spot), and the Economist (GM prepares its getaway), praise GM's recovery, but the truth is, GM chose to retreat, rather than to fight to recover lost ground in terms of market share, salaries, or wages. In other words, they favored shareholders and executives over hourly workers, the people who actually earn the profits GM is so eager to brag about.

The auto industry shed 330,000 US jobs since 2008. And how many did they shed back in the eighties and nineties? And how many supplier jobs were lost that aren’t counted here?. I live in the suburbs of Detroit, and I can drive for miles past shuttered tool and die shops, and manufacturing plants. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a guy who had a well paid, skilled union job, and now he’s retired at fifty, or swinging a hammer for a living with no benefits. And these are the guys who actually know how to build things. Their fathers and grandfathers built our manufacturing base, and without their skills we’ll never re-build it. And if we don’t rebuild it, we’ll never have a real rebound in our economy that yields broad prosperity. We’ll just continue to get what we’ve been getting, a narrowing band of wealth at the top, and vast legions of un- or under-employed, under-skilled poor.

And now the big three brag they trimmed wages (starting wage in an American UAW plant is around $14). Adjusted for inflation, I bet that's less than the $5 a day Henry Ford offered workers when he reasoned that employees won't be consumers if you don't pay them a decent, livable wage.

The new CEO, GM board member, Dan Akerson, has worked recently for the Carlyle Group, the bottom feeding private equity firm that has spent the last twenty years burying US manufacturing firms in debt, and then selling off the firm's assets (asset stripping) for pennies on the dollar, to yield healthy profits for Carlyle's well-heeled, capitalized investors, and a decimated manufacturing base for the rest of us. What sort of future for GM's domestic employment does that portend?

So what does the average, hourly-wage, taxpayer get for their bailout of GM? More competition for fewer jobs at a lower wage. And who gains besides shareholders and executives? A skeleton crew of engineering and management staff who glance over their shoulders every day, with the grim expectation that their job has been outsourced to someone in India earning 1/100 as much.

No, NAFTA Was Not President Clinton's Idea

(A reply to a comment on an article, "Rebuild America, Don't Sack It," by Robert L. Borosage, at the Huffington Post.)

Yes, Clinton signed NAFTA into law, but it was largely an initiative by Republican politicians, with George H.W. Bush out in front signing the initial draft. Republican politicians then positioned NAFTA as do or die for the American economy, and anyone who opposes it is an un-American, big government, anti-jobs, socialist.


I'll quote a bit of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA):

"In the U.S., Bush, who had worked to 'fast track' the signing prior to the end of his term, ran out of time and had to pass the required ratification and signing into law to incoming president Bill Clinton. Prior to sending it to the House of Representatives, Clinton introduced clauses to protect American workers and allay the concerns of many House members. It also required U.S. partners to adhere to environmental practices and regulations similar to its own."

And this was after the private equity, leveraged buyout, asset stripping frenzy of the tax and tariff-cutting Reagan years during which much of the U.S. industrial base was sold off for pennies on the dollar, and its jobs sent overseas by capitalized investors, who tend to vote Republican.


(And no, not everyone who votes Republican should be demonized, but it mostly Republican politicians who legislate in favor of a minority: capitalized investors; at the expense of the majority: hourly workers)
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Bush Appointee Upholds Virginia's Challenge to Affordable Care Act

UPDATE, December 13, 2010: Here is Judge Hudson's (Federal District Court, Eastern District, VA) latest decision: http://s3.amazonaws.com/nytdocs/docs/539/539.pdf

     Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, behaving like crass, self-interest obsessed Republicans do, seeks to have the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform bill passed last year by Congress, ruled unconstitutional. He contends that the health care law is unconstitutional because it exceeds the established bounds of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and because it contradicts a recently passed Virginia law, Virginia Health Care Freedom Act, which makes it unlawful to require that Virginia citizens be covered by some form of health insurance...

1 HOUSE BILL NO. 10
2 Offered January 13, 2010
3 Prefiled December 7, 2009
4 A BILL to amend the Code of Virginia by adding a section numbered 38.2-302.1, relating to a person's
5 participation in a health care system or plan; Virginia Health Care Freedom Act.
6 ––––––––––
Patrons––Marshall, R.G., O'Bannon, Athey, Carrico, Cole, Cox, J.A., Cox, M.K., Edmunds, Garrett,
Gear, Gilbert, Greason, Howell, W.J., Johnson, Jones, Landes, Lingamfelter, Miller, J.H., Morgan,
Nixon, Oder, Pogge, Tata and Wright; Senators: Martin and Stuart
7 ––––––––––
8 Referred to Committee on Commerce and Labor
9 ––––––––––
10 Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:
11 1. That the Code of Virginia is amended by adding a section numbered 38.2-302.1 as follows:
12 § 38.2-302.1. Virginia Health Care Freedom Act.
13 No law shall restrict a person's natural right and power of contract to secure the blessings of liberty
14 to choose private health care systems or private plans. No law shall interfere with the right of a person
15 or entity to pay for lawful medical services to preserve life or health, nor shall any law impose a
16 penalty, tax, fee, or fine, of any type, to decline or to contract for health care coverage or to participate
17 in any particular health care system or plan, except as required by a court where an individual or entity
18 is a named party in a judicial dispute. Nothing herein shall be construed to expand, limit or otherwise
19 modify any determination of law regarding what constitutes lawful medical services within the
20 Commonwealth.

     This is just the sort of reactionary, obstructionist, big-business coddling, horseshit that Republican lawmakers have engaged in since the Democrats regained control of Congress. And it defies the best interests of the United States, especially the interests of its poorest citizens. You can be damn sure that Judge Hudson's and Ken T. Cuccinelli II's access to competent doctors, diagnoses, and care won't be obstructed, though. And you can be equally sure the Virginia Legislature did not pass their dumb ass act  because it would insure health care equity for all Virginia's citizens. No, Republicans don't give a damn about insuring that every citizen has access to competent health care, and they sure as hell don't give a damn about poor people. Republicans, the ones making laws anyway, don't even know what being poor feels like, or looks like, or smells like. Oh, they may have been poor once, but they've forgotten what being poor is all about, their words and deeds prove that. They think poor people are poor because they are lazy, self-indulgent, slobs who don't talk right, and don't dress right, and don't get their hair cut right, and that's why they are poor.

     But Republicans do manage to persuade impoverished and, astonishingly, middle-class citizens to support them. They do this with shameless appeals to primordial tribal instincts that dictate exclusion and destruction of outsiders who don’t share the tribe's dogma and rituals. Manipulative, self-serving leaders define the evil "other," and then blame the "other" for all the problems their deluded followers face. And these pompous, self-righteous, plutocrats maintain their followers delusions by preserving their ignorance: they insist that religious doctrine trumps facts, and that science and logic are the tools of godless infidels (isn't that the Taliban's argument, too?). Throughout, they contend that sacred principles are at stake, that it's not about the money. Well, if someone, especially a politician, tells you, “it's not about the money,” you can be absolutely damned sure it is.

     United States District Judge Henry E. Hudson, appointed by George W. Bush, wrote the following summary of his argument:

     In the complaint, the Commonwealth of Virginia (“the Commonwealth”) assails Section 1501 (or “Minimum Essential Coverage Provision”) on a number of fronts. First, the Commonwealth contends that requiring an otherwise unwilling individual to purchase a good or service from a private vendor is beyond the outer limits of the Commerce Clause. In the Commonwealth’s view, the failure -- or refusal -- of its citizens to elect to purchase health insurance is not “economic activity” and therefore is not subject to federal regulation under the Commerce Clause. Succinctly put, the Commonwealth defies the Secretary to point to any Commerce Clause jurisprudence extending its tentacles to an individual’s decision not to engage in economic activity. Furthermore, they argue that since Section 1501 exceeds this enumerated power, Congress cannot invoke either the Necessary and Proper Clause or its taxation powers to regulate such passive economic inactivity.

     I especially like the "tentacles" part. But I won't try to dissect the Judge's decision. That's been done much better by lots of qualified people. Here, for example, is a nice short article that does that: "Judge Preserves Constitutional Challenge to Individual Mandate." It's written by a professor at Yale Law School. Someone who will, no doubt, be filleted by the blowhards on Fox who will have nothing remotely substantive to say about the man's argument, but will surely malign his qualifications and character, and refer to him as an East Coast Liberal, which I suppose he is, or isn't, I don't know. Either way, tough shit, Fox.

     And here we go again. The big-business, Republican lapdogs in Congress couldn't defeat President Obama's health care reform via legislative maneuvers (though they did manage to water the bill down to the point of being nearly useless for the vast majority of middle-class Americans whom a little relief in the expenses column would benefit greatly), so they want to kill the bill with a thousand cuts. This will require the usual dimwitted, specious arguments about principal, and in defense of the sacred Constitution, and God himself -- Republicans always claim to be speaking for God -- and they will, with their chests puffed out, proudly stand in the way of children's lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness. They will make sure that poor, sick people who work three crummy, non-union, minimum-wage, no-benefit jobs do not visit doctors regularly, but instead put off medical care until it's too late, and then run to the hospital emergency room to die. And health insurance companies will continue to book record profits for their capitalized shareholders, because they will continue to deny lawful claims, and wear paying clients down with the perpetual run around, until -- sick and weary -- they quit pleading for help.

    That's what Republicans are talking about when they talk about principles.