The Eternal Flame

They lined the highways and streets to usher his casket to the Kennedy Library, where tens of thousands filed past to pay their respects. Again they lined the streets and highways around Boston in the pouring rain, as Ted Kennedy made his final trip to Washington. There, they lined the streets and stood in front of the Capitol, where colleagues and former staff waited, and when the casket was about to depart, the crowd spontaneously sang "America the Beautiful," and people called out "Thank you!" and "We love you!" as the hearse moved slowly towards Arlington. There, in the swiftly falling darkness, the final ceremonies, the final loving words--this time from grandchildren--and as lightning flashed in the distance, Edward Moore Kennedy joined his brothers again.

Remembering Teddy

His brothers were JFK and RFK but he was always Teddy. The grandson of the Mayor of Boston who threw out the first pitch at Fenway Park, one of his last public acts was to throw out the first pitch there this spring. At his memorial on Friday at the Kennedy Library, he was remembered as a father (to the children of his fallen brothers as well as his own, when--as Joseph Kennedy, son of RFK said, "we really needed a father"), a friend, a colleague, a human being of great generosity and spirit, and one of the greatest Senators in U.S. history, who had a hand in most of the progressive laws passed in the last 46 years, including those that Americans take for granted, like Medicare, Title 9, voting age at 18, health care for children, the Voting Rights Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, the Disabilities Act, and so many more. His funeral will begin in a few hours, with a eulogy given by President Obama. (More on the meaning of Ted Kennedy to my generation at 60s Now.)

R.I. P. Senator Ted Kennedy

Senator Ted Kennedy, here in a recent photo with his niece, Caroline Kennedy, has died of brain cancer, his family announced early Wednesday. It is doubly sad since he didn't live to lead the fight for health care legislation and see it happen, for it was one of the persistent causes of his life. He was my Senator when I lived in Massachusetts, and I heard him speak several times over the years. I worked on his presidential primary campaign in PA in 1980. Coincidentally, he's quoted extensively from one of the times I heard him, in 1975, in the new posts at Kowincidence. There will be much more said about him today, and many more memories revived. For now, the NY Times obit, and this quote taken from it: Senator Kennedy: "We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make.”

The Future's Past

The Perisphere and other elements of the 1939 World's Fair in New York, which was an elaborate model of "The World of Tomorrow." Consider it a little ad for new posts at Kowincidence, one of my first and most neglected "blogs." It was never really a blog--more of an archive for articles and essays I wanted to preserve in cyberspace, as paradoxical as that sounds. That play on my name comes from college, when somebody (Wendy Saul? Mary Jacobson? Barbie Cottral?) dubbed me Big Kowincidence, after I'd published a Joycean/John Lennonish column that gave them all such names. Anyway, when blogspot started I immediately saw the potential for using the free server space for my own purposes. Posting old published articles also gave me the opportunity to re-edit them and restore what various editors had done to them, which was an important impulse at the time.
But that was before it was easy to post photos, etc. So I'm (slowly) rebuilding it, and finally started that process by posting a "new" article, which is actually older than most of the pieces already there. It's the combination of two articles I did in 1975 and 76, on futurists and the future. It might be interesting to compare it to our situation, and feelings about the future, more than 30 years later. More on the topic another day. In the meantime, I've added Kowincidence to the "My Little Blogosphere" list to the left, so you can tell at a glance when something "new" has been posted. Maybe you'll visit.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat: and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of Europe of the future."

A character in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man (1916) by James Joyce

Serendipity

I am a great believer in serendipity as a research technique. Even before Google and Internet links made stumbling onto stuff a required feature of information gathering, I learned to measure how close I was getting to something really interesting by the frequency and quality of material pertinent to a topic I was developing in my own mind that I came upon by coincidence, or more precisely, by being alert to it, and hungry.

For instance, the books that I found on random sale tables, or even in piles of discards, often proved invaluable. Either they related to what I already knew or had begun exploring but in a new way, or they opened up new but suddenly related subjects and connections. Several times they introduced me to authors, some of whom I immediately called or visited to interview--at least when I had a magazine or newspaper assignment or book contract to back me up.

Serendipity seems to require stubbornness. Or maybe serendipity is one of the few rewards of stubbornness, a payoff for apparently wasted time. A case in point, of something--or in this case, someone-- interesting I didn't know of before, who turns out to relate to other current investigations:

I happened on the above quote ("I'm a democrat: and I'll work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of Europe of the future") about five years ago. The author (James Joyce) and the year (1916) were given, but not the work. I have a small Joyce collection and I looked it up in Ellman's biography and the indexes to other works, with no luck. (As it turned out, the attribution to Joyce is what threw me off.) So I tried it another way: the piece where I first saw the quote was an Internet essay about Jeremy Rifkin's book, The European Dream. Maybe Joyce was quoted in that book. But when I checked the Rifkin book, Joyce wasn't in its index at all. Still, it's a pretty interesting book.

I must have just forgotten about this quote after that, but I did file it and source in a computer "folder" that I opened the other day, looking for something else. That I didn't know the source of the quote bothered me again, and this is where stubbornness comes in. However, that quality is more usefully applied these days--for even five years ago, Google and Wikipedia etc. either didn't exist or weren't as capacious as now. So a search got me some leads, and I saw what my first problem had been: though the quote is attributed to Joyce, it is from a fiction--either his book of short stories (Dubliners) or his first novel (A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man), both with the publication date of 1916. The reason that wasn't obvious to me is that it was quoted as a statement by Joyce, not by one of his characters.

A couple of references--notes in books online, but only excerpts--were tantalizing but imprecise. So I got down my annotated versions of both books, and began to compare with what was online. First I narrowed it down to Portrait. But my particular annotated didn't have a reference to the quote, so I had to trace another online (and partial) set of annotations and compare references it made with references made in my copy, to narrow down where the quote might be. I had the character's name, and finally, I found the quote, on page 177. The words belong to a subsidiary character, and so can't be really thought of as the statement of the author's views. But it was something striking to say in 1916.

The annotation mentions that the character who said it was based on a student Joyce knew when he was a student in Ireland, and who was murdered by a British soldier in 1916. The Easter uprising of that year isn't mentioned. But it's also the same year the book was published.

The annotation also mentions that the phrase "United States of Europe" was the title of a popular book published in 1899 by a well-known journalist of the time, William Thomas Stead. As editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (according to the wikipedia bio) he pioneered the news interview and what we now call investigative journalism. He traveled the world, met with leaders and wrote about the geopolitical moment. Politically he was progressive and a pacifist.

Stead also was deeply interested in spiritualism, and reportedly had premonitions of death at sea. So of course, that's where he died--and of course, in the most spectacular way: as a passenger on the Titanic. He was on his way to New York to attend an international peace conference. He had written about the danger of ocean liners without an adequate number of lifeboats.

The wikipedia bio only scratches the surface (though it's a pretty fascinating surface) but another site has links to much more information, including PDF versions of many of his books, such as the aforementioned United States of Europe. I dipped into it and it looks tempting, partly because--and this is another element of serendipity currently at work--he is a figure I knew nothing of who lived in a period that I've returned to again and again, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first through H.G. Wells and C.G. Jung separately, then through the two of them together.

I'd had several years of that, and then some quiet. But now a sudden recent storm of 19th century connections: a quote from Shelley (leading to the essay itself, which I found in a college literature anthology used by my uncle in 1951--the uncle who I saw earlier this summer, when we had our first one-to-one meal together in 30 years) and a look at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, followed a few days later by a revealing review (by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books) of a new book about the links between science and poetry in the 19th century Romantic period (Age of Wonder), which mentions both Shelleys, as well as both Darwins (Erasmus, who proposed evolution, and his grandson Charles, who formulated it.) It also covers a bit of the same ground as another new book I was looking at for possible review, The Atmosphere of Heaven, and a play I did review last week, the execrable musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde--another 19th century fable of the impact of science, which like Frankenstein has come down to us through movies that are based on popular stage plays rather than the original novels.

This last burst was also coincident with another thread: the impulse to pull Eric Bentley's book on George Bernard Shaw down from the shelf when it caught my eye (and yes, I was looking for something else--the little pump I keep on that shelf to pump up my basketball), and then I became its captive. Shaw's views on Darwin (which I also then sampled in his preface to his theatre epic, Back to Methuselah) pertain to Wells, whose science fiction is largely directed by his interpretation of Darwin. Wells and Shaw knew each other for much of their long lives (they met as newspaper drama critics) and so from reading about them separately, I read their correspondence with each other.

All of this bears on a writing project that's absorbed many hours over many years, with the end always just beyond the horizon. And it's spun off other projects that actually got done--a number of published essays, and a play about Wells and Jung. But there seems always to be more.

A better understanding of Shaw and his relationship to Wells and the issues they both dealt with, bears upon the role of Wells in this project--although there's a neat little play to be found in those two. Another possible avenue of inquiry is this William Thomas Stead, who was a slightly earlier editor of a publication the young Wells wrote for--it was in fact the Pall Mall Gazette that employed Wells as its theatre critic when he met Shaw. As the editor of another magazine, Stead approved publication of a version of Wells' tales about a time traveller. Stead's globetrotting journalism and global vision are also what Wells was doing at about the same time--yet Stead's name does not appear in Wells' autobiography. I wonder why...

So the moral of the story seems to be this: serendipity can lead to new insights and new works, though it can also simply be a forking path on an absorbing journey, through a landscape that is partly familiar and always partly frontier.

Domestic Terrorists

"In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama's healthcare event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, "It is time to water the tree of liberty" -- a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence. And this past week, 12 armed men -- including one with an assault rifle -- not only showed off their firearms at Obama's Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to "forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority."

These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. Generating maximum media attention, the weapons-brandishing displays are "intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm."

--from What it means to wear a gun in public by David Sirota in Salon.

Universal Healthcare--and the Sky Didn't Fall

When the City of San Francisco installed its plan for universal healthcare, it got the same crazed predictions of doom from opponents as we're hearing now. Two years later, it's working, and a new study says that the impact opponents warned of--job losses and businesses fleeing from the mandate to provide healthcare--didn't happen.

From today's SF Chronicle story:

"The sky has not fallen - the world as we know it did not come to an end," said [Mayor Gavin] Newsom, adding the controversial policy didn't prompt businesses to leave, bureaucracies to sprout up or the city's economy to crater.

Healthy San Francisco started in July 2007 to ensure the city's 60,000 uninsured residents had access to health care without regard for their pre-existing medical conditions, immigration status or employment status. It has now covered about 75 percent of the uninsured at a cost of roughly $120 million a year including city money, state grants, employer contributions and participants' fees."

This is all the more impressive because a city doesn't have the size and bargaining power of a state or of a nation.

Emerson for the Day

"There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical."

Emerson, "Circles"

The Brink of Madness

Update 8/20: At least E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post is taking this seriously, though he is more measured than I felt I needed to be in this post. But he endorses the points that these are acts of intimidation, and they are dangerous.


The logic of what is happening is predictable, but how fast it is playing out is truly alarming. Especially since the danger is so great, and because there should be widespread public alarm, but there is not.

We're on the fast track to catastrophe. And it could happen very, very quickly. And then it will take on a death of its own.

No one seems to know what to make of it. It's weird. It's a joke. It passes through the media like every other oddity, just part of the noise. We don't seem to know what's really dangerous anymore.

It started with media inciters, with the talk of patriotic insurrection, of death to various enemies, including the President and his family. It became more organized and funded, with violent feelings whipped to a frenzy for political and monetary gain.

Then people began showing up at so-called town hall meetings to shout and threaten and wave incendiary signs. As one congressman noted, these were the exact tactics of the fascists in Germany before Hitler came to power.

Then one man showed up with a gun. Then another.

Then one man showed up with a loaded gun--a pistol in a holster-- in a crowd outside a town hall meeting with President Obama. To the surprise and shock of many, carrying a loaded gun in public, in a crowd, to a political event, near the President, was legal in that state, and in other states. This man got a lot of attention, as did his sign, which carried a quote that implied that it was time to shed some blood. He got interviewed on cable TV.

On Monday, at least two men were seen outside a town hall meeting in Arizona where the President was speaking, with assault rifles. At least twelve people in the crowd were reported to have guns. One of the armed men who was interviewed said that more people should come to these events displaying guns.

The next escalation of this drama is the fateful one. Someone is going to fire one of those guns. Someone gets angry, gets scared, gets desperate to get on TV.

Then what happens?

These are events fraught with emotion, in which at least two sides are passionately opposed, and one side is threatening the other. These are events that also attract people who are simply interested in hearing more about health care reform proposals, or in seeing their Member of Congress, or especially in seeing the President. There are families. There are mothers with babies. There are school children. There are elderly, and people in wheelchairs. When guns are fired--especially automatic or semi-automatic weapons, with the power of assault rifles--many innocent people could be maimed or killed very quickly.

At these events there are people of all races. There is already a racial element to the political situation. It's another factor that could add to violence, however it starts.

Some of the people who now feel empowered to carry guns to political events are likely to be angry. Chanting, yelling groups in each others' faces whip up more anger. Carrying a gun to a political event is aggressive, an act of intimidation. People are going to feel threatened, and they could get angry.

So someone gets angry and puts a hand on a gun. Someone else gets nervous and pulls a gun. The first shot fired is not certain to be the last. With all the publicity, it's likely that there will be people on both sides who come armed. Police will get involved, and perhaps fire their weapons. There's no telling what response there will be to that among those who feel government is out to get them.

Add to this mix the appearance of assault weapons. They can kill scores of people in seconds. A couple of assault weapons may outgun local police who are present.

And this is not the worst possible scenario. If twelve individuals with guns can show up, why would terrorists have to hide? A cadre of twelve shooters can do a lot of damage.

Regarding presidential events, the Secret Service professes not to be worried. If they really are not worried, then that worries me. They can legally prevent guns from getting near the President, but that is not the same as actually preventing it. How many assault weapons would it take to either get through them, or divert them from hidden shooters?

If a serious attempt were made on the President's life, which would almost certainly involve others being killed, or if certain circumstances accompany gun violence in a crowd at or near one of these events, we may be looking at more than one tragic event. Given the number and power of guns in this country, and all of the feelings--including racial feelings--as well as the speed and intensity of communication, we could quickly be embroiled in something beyond even the 60s urban riots--a kind and a level of violence this nation has never seen.

If the President is the target, it will likely be even worse. The assassination of President Obama, which these opponents are inviting (but which they of course would deny they meant literally), would be the death of hope, and given the historical situation, the death of the future. What kind of violence it might unleash in the immediate aftermath is terrible to contemplate.

What's to be done to prevent this? The first step is to stop treating the appearance of assault weapons at these events as something weird and funny, but unimportant. It is a clear and present danger. Because it's been allowed to go this far, it is already dangerous to deal with. But it is more dangerous to let it continue on its path. It's an axiom of the theatre that showing a gun in the first act means that before the play is over, that gun will be fired. We would be utter fools to ignore that likelihood in our national political drama.

In the weeks before the Bush administration started the Iraq War, I was one of those warning that this one step was fatal--that letting loose the dogs of war had its own inexorable logic, which has nothing to do with rationality. Once it begins, war has its own momentum, and we have felt the truth of that in too many tragic ways for year after year.

Right now we're at the brink again, this time of a kind of violence we cannot predict. Except that the logic of it is clear. It isn't rational, but once the first shot is fired, what happens will be beyond anyone's control.

And when it happens, we will be shocked, and there will be remorse and recriminations. And it will be too late.

The Cost of Inaction--You're Paying It Now

In his weekly address, President Obama sets the record straight on what his healthcare reform proposals will do--and will not do. "So when folks with a stake in the status quo keep inventing these boogeymen in an effort to scare people, it’s disappointing, but it’s not surprising. We’ve seen it before. When President Roosevelt was working to create Social Security, opponents warned it would open the door to "federal snooping" and force Americans to wear dog tags. When President Kennedy and President Johnson were working to create Medicare, opponents warned of "socialized medicine." Sound familiar? Not only were those fears never realized, but more importantly, those programs have saved the lives of tens of millions of seniors, the disabled, and the disadvantaged.

Those who would stand in the way of reform will say almost anything to scare you about the cost of action. But they won’t say much about the cost of inaction. If you’re worried about rationed care, higher costs, denied coverage, or bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, then you should know that’s what’s happening right now. In the past three years, over 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies due to a preexisting condition, or saw their coverage denied or dropped just when they got sick and needed it most. Americans whose jobs and health care are secure today just don’t know if they’ll be next to join the 14,000 who lose their health insurance every single day. And if we don’t act, average family premiums will keep rising to more than $22,000 within a decade."

At a town hall in Colorado, President Obama took on the most pernicious and repulsive of the false charges against healthcare reform: the so-called death panels that opponents have invented, claiming they would decide which seniors to kill. "What you can't do, or you can, but you shouldn't do -- is start saying things like we want to set up death panels to pull the plug on grandma." President Obama paused and grew emotional. "First of all, when you make a comment like that, I just lost my grandmother last year... I know what its like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate... When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest. Especially when I hear the arguments coming from members of congress in the other party..."

President Obama also wrote an oped in the New York Times outlining his health insurance proposals and the reasons these changes are vital for the health of Americans, their financial futures, the economy and to get control of the federal deficit.

Pittsburgh, This is Your Time

With the reigning champions in NHL hockey (the Penguins) and NFL football (the Steelers, who again beat the Arizona Cardinals Thursday, this time in a preseason game), Pittsburgh has had a good year, tarnished however by two acts of gun violence by lunatics of the Rabid Right. For the next month or so it is the center of different attention: first as the host of the current Netroots convention (President Clinton delivered the keynote Thursday), and then as the host of the international G-20 convention in September--selected by Barack Obama, the same weekend that the Steelers visited the White House, and he put them to work packing care packages for U.S. troops.

Visitors will find some big changes since the last time Pittsburgh was the City of Champions (which was the last time any city had two championship pro teams, in 1979.) The steel mills were pretty much gone by then, and the new economy that is helping Pittsburgh weather the Great Recession better than other Rust Belt cities is symbolized in the bottom photo of downtown from across the Mon River: that big black building peeking from behind the gleaming silver ones used to say U.S. Steel and USX, but now it's UPMC--University of Pittsburgh Medical Centers. Universities and medicine are the biggest game in town, with high tech (centered also at Carnegie Mellon) adding to the diversity.

Pittsburgh has also once again been voted America's Most Liveable City, having maintained modest housing prices that didn't bubble or break as much as elsewhere, meanwhile adding to cultural and arts institutions, and continuing to make the rivers and other natural assets more accessible. I'm sure Netroots people are discovering the walkable downtown from the comfortable green convention center. The city government has had economic problems and the Great Recession has cut into some local institutions, but this is still a great city--even on the relatively gray day in June I snapped these photos.

President Obama: The Health Care I Believe In

"We have a health care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people...I don't believe anybody should be in charge of your health care decisions but you and your doctor. I don't think government bureaucrats should be meddling, but I also don't think insurance company bureaucrats should be meddling. That's the health care system I believe in." All quotes and photos in this and following posts on this date are from President Obama's Town Hall Meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire today. For another aspects of this and other recent town halls, go here to American Dash.

Health Is Not For Sale

"Under the reform we're proposing, insurance companies will be prohibited from denying coverage because of a person's medical history. Period. (Applause.) They will not be able to drop your coverage if you get sick. (Applause.) They will not be able to water down your coverage when you need it. (Applause.) Your health insurance should be there for you when it counts -- not just when you're paying premiums, but when you actually get sick. And it will be when we pass this plan. (Applause.)

Now, when we pass health insurance reform, insurance companies will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. And we will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because no one in America should go broke because they get sick. " (Applause.)

No Death Panels

"The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for "death panels" that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't -- it's too expensive to let her live anymore. (Laughter.) And there are various -- there are some variations on this theme.

It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, et cetera. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they're ready, on their own terms. It wasn't forcing anybody to do anything. This is I guess where the rumor came from.

The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican -- then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia -- who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people's options. And somehow it's gotten spun into this idea of "death panels." I am not in favor of that. So just I want to -- (applause.) I want to clear the air here."

What Healthcare Reform is About

"So this is what reform is about. For all the chatter and the yelling and the shouting and the noise, what you need to know is this: If you don't have health insurance, you will finally have quality, affordable options once we pass reform. (Applause.) If you do have health insurance, we will make sure that no insurance company or government bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need. And we will do this without adding to our deficit over the next decade..."

Health Care for the Future

"Our deficit will continue to grow because Medicare and Medicaid are on an unsustainable path. Medicare is slated to go into the red in about eight to 10 years. I don't know if people are aware of that. If I was a senior citizen, the thing I'd be worried about right now is Medicare starts running out of money because we haven't done anything to make sure that we're getting a good bang for our buck when it comes to health care. And insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against people for the simple crime of being sick. Now, that's not a future I want for my children. It's not a future that I want for the United States of America."

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We must take comfort from the fact that human nature gives rise to altruism as well as selfishness, to conscience as well as cruelty. The hope of the race is that passions of generosity, restraint, and goodness may prove as strong as those of egoism, aggression, and cruelty.”

Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw

Bird Brains

Intelligence? It's for the birds. (It sure doesn't seem to be for certain people I'm not going to think about this weekend.) It's taken slow human scientists a long time to notice the varieties of intelligent skills in birds, possibly because their brains are embarrasingly small. (The birds I mean.) The latest bird to startle the scientists? No, not starlings. Rooks. It seems Aesop was something of a scientist himself.

The First

Congratulations to Judge Sonia Sotomayor, confirmed today to be Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama's first nominee to the Court, she will be the first Latina to serve on the Court. The Senate confirmed her today with only 8 votes from the Hate, Lies, Violence and White Supremacists Party.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination;"

--P.B. Shelley... photo: Northern lights, North Dakota

Prescriptions in the Healthcare Debate

John Stewart complained to his guest, Rep Howard Waxman (a Dem leading on healthcare legislation) that Democrats aren't clearly and briefly explaining what they're trying to do with their reform bills--that in fact, Stewart had "fallen asleep for four minutes" during Waxman's last answer. (I don't know how boring it was--I'd zapped over to SportsCenter for a minute myself).

Even given that the clarity of shouting and lying by Republican and insurance funded thugs showing up at town hall meetings is hard to beat, it's a fair point. Waxman is mostly boring, as (it pains me to say it) is Sec. Kathleen Sebelius. The most effective interview I've seen recently was by Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. She said reform was needed so that your doctor doesn't have to call up your insurance company to see if they'll pay for the treatment you need. She had a few other pithy quotes. I elect her spokesperson for healthcare.

Nevertheless, I have some longwinded notes here from two notable articles. One is in the LA Times, on the Canadian health care system, written by Michael M. Rachlis, a Canadian doctor and health policy analyst. The side-by-side comparisons are so extreme it's enough to make you weep:

On coverage, all Canadians have insurance for hospital and physician services. There are no deductibles or co-pays. Most provinces also provide coverage for programs for home care, long-term care, pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment, although there are co-pays.On the U.S. side, 46 million people have no insurance, millions are underinsured and healthcare bills bankrupt more than 1 million Americans every year.

On costs, Canada spends 10% of its economy on healthcare; the U.S. spends 16%. The extra 6% of GDP amounts to more than $800 billion per year. The spending gap between the two nations is almost entirely because of higher overhead. Canadians don't need thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care. Even the U.S. Medicare program has 80% to 90% lower administrative costs than private Medicare Advantage policies. And providers and suppliers can't charge as much when they have to deal with a single payer.

He admits there are some problems in delivering good and timely care, but most are problems just as bad in the U.S., while others have nothing to do with the single-payer system. How about choice? "Canadians have free choice of physicians. It's Americans these days who are restricted to "in-plan" doctors."

So if it's so great, why doesn't everybody admit it? "Unfortunately, many Americans won't get to hear the straight goods because vested interests are promoting a caricature of the Canadian experience."

Vested interests? That would be the insurance companies paying out $1.4 million a day to defeat healthcare reform, and that doesn't include all the lobbying and political payoffs. But actually they aren't paying it. The people buying their insurance are. You are. Apart from making some executives very wealthy, that's what the profits are for. That's why you're allowed to pay them their ever-increasing premiums, but risk getting your insurance cancelled if you have the temerity to get sick and actually ask them to insure you.

Okay, next exhibit: an economic analysis by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez on why a public insurance plan is essential to the success of reform. The points track pretty well with what President Obama has been saying: for example, that the public plan introduces competition into a healthcare "market" that pretty much has none anymore:

This lack of competition is a major source of the United States’ uniquely high and rising health costs. A public plan option would force private insurers to compete on efficiency and quality, rather than on their ability to enroll the lowest-cost workers and firms. Furthermore, a public plan would introduce competition to currently monopolistic or oligopolistic insurer and provider markets—three or fewer insurers account for at least 65% of market share in 36 states.

A public plan would reduce costs and foster innovation, the article says, and serve as a benchmark for the insurance market:

Public-private competition is a longstanding feature in the vast majority of advanced postindustrial economies, particularly in health care. Private and public insurers each bring different strengths and weaknesses to the marketplace, complementing one another. One of public insurance’s key strengths is the ability to set a high standard for cost, quality, and access within a national marketplace, to the benefit of private and public insurers, providers, and enrollees alike. If enrollees are unsatisfied with the public plan, they would be able to easily switch back to private insurers."

Not as colorful as big fat idiots screaming big fat idiocies, but a lot more pertinent. Although in the unlikely event that there is a town hall meeting in my neighborhood, I'm seriously considering standing in front of the podium shouting La salute non si paga! Health is not for sale!

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation, virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the intercourse of kind."

P.B. Shelley: A Defense of Poetry

Medicare for All

Congress went on vacation, with all three committees in the House approving a healthcare reform bill, and one of two in the Senate. While headlines emphasize that support for the Obama proposals was weakening, there is also substantial strength of support, and the distinct possibility that the worst is almost over, and the momentum could swing back to a more robust bill with a strong public option.

Congressional Republicans are clearly making it their priority to defeat any plan President Obama would approve. They have allied their political interests with the economic interests of insurance conglomerates and Big Pharma, as have some conservative Democrats. So now there are two sides (at least) and throughout August they will battle for popular support.

So far GOPers have apparently caused public anxiety about healthcare reform mostly through telling shameless lies, especially by saying that Obama wants to kill seniors. So far, Obama and the Democrats have been less than adroit in responding. While Obama's low-key reasoning drives the media crazy, it generally has been effective with the voting public. On this issue however a little righteous indignation might be called for--if not from Barack, then from Michelle. Because that's what the right is saying: if you're old, Obama wants to kill you.

I support the President on health care, and urge others to do so. But I am resigned to reform that will do much less than it should. It is likely to be complex and unwieldy, and morally as well as operationally compromised. It's clear from the experience of other nations, and from the experience of this nation with Medicare, that the method that works is basically a not-for-profit health care system with all medical insurance administered by the national government.

This is known these days as the "single-payer" system, a term so guarded and abstract that it could mean anything. Today I heard another description: Medicare for all. That's a phrase that people would immediately understand, and given that a higher percentage of Medicare recipients are pleased with it than any other kind of medical insurance, it could gain widespread approval.

Medicare is so popular, that people don't even think of it as a government program. I have to admit that I'm surprised that after the past decade and a half of corporate shamelessness and multi-billion dollar bureaucracies devoted to denying care, the spectre of government involvement in healthcare is still an effective scare tactic. Despite the fact, that as Paul Krugman shows, health care in America only works at all because the government is involved.

Medicare looks like it has its frustrations and complexities, too (if I get through the next few years I'll let you know how it works.) But it has very low administrative costs, and already pays for preventive care that most insurance doesn't. But Medicare for all comes closest to, say, that dreaded Canadian system, where (as a recent article about Vancouver puts it) polls suggest Canadians love their health system -- they spend about 55 percent of what Americans spend on comparable health care, and they have longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality rates." GOPers love the urban myth about Canadians coming to the U.S. for medical care--right, all of about 20 of them. Versus more than a million Californians who go to Mexico for treatment they can't afford in the U.S.

Medicare for all is also morally and ethically clear: you don't make money off of the sick and dying, not when you can afford not to. (And again, profit is what corporations get after doctors, nurses, administrators, etc. are paid, as well as the equipment, research, etc. All profit pays for is mansions for CEOs, buying other companies and paying for marketing and lobbying so the profits keep coming.) In other words (you know I'm going to say it), La salute non si paga: health is not for sale!

So why do I support President Obama, the principles he stands for, and the plan that he is likely to support? In the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to figure out how to rebuild a shattered economy and society. He and his advisors came up with policies and programs that focused on structural and long-term solutions. They were necessary. But he was reminded of the suffering of the moment by his two closest advisors, his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, and advisor Harry Hopkins who said this: "People don't eat in the long term. They eat every day."

I think of that quote often. To me it means your responsibility includes dealing with the needs and suffering of the moment. Such a philosophy led to most of the New Deal programs we remember, including those that have turned out to have lasting benefits. (Some of the state parks that California may be closing were built by the CCCs during the Depression.)

President Obama seems very mindful of these two responsibilities--to the long term and to the needs of now. His Recovery Act shows this. I also believe that balancing these two responsibilities is of foremost importance to him, over considerations of re-election.

But in any case this is my belief. Applied to health care, it means to me that it's important to fight for the principle of health is not for sale, and for every government program and law that furthers that principle. I would like to see Medicare for all become a clarion call. But if the public gets queasy about the kinds of changes Washington is contemplating, it looks like a long time coming before Medicare for all is politically possible.

The danger is that the kind of mixed private-public system in current Congressional bills (especially one with a very weak or illusory public component) won't succeed in helping people, but Washington will consider the job done and not focus again on health care. Well, it will just as likely be a long time before Washington focuses on it again if no bill is passed at all. And we know the current system is terrible, and is going to get worse, for individuals and the national economy.

The bills before Congress probably will make some important long term and structural changes for the better. But it also becomes about eating every day--or getting the medical attention and care you need today. So if a health insurance reform bill passes Congress that means that more people get the medical care they need--people with "pre-existing conditions" or who change jobs or who can't afford insurance now or who won't even seek care because it will bankrupt their families--then that bill is worth signing into law. Even if I'm not one of those people.

Stimulated

The latest economic reports and analyses by prominent analysts indicate that the world and the country avoided a catastrophic collapse, and the Great Recession itself may have bottomed out, although it's still pretty bad for the non-wealthy. Though chances seem good that it won't get worse, it may be awhile before it gets noticeably better.


In his weekly address, President Obama noted that the latest data shows that the Recession was "even deeper than we thought" but that over the past few months the economy improved "measurably better than expected" which many economists say is "directly attributable to the Recovery Act."

Yes, the Stimulus the GOPers are complaining about. The immediate job creation portion saved a number of jobs, especially in state and local government (including teachers, fire departments, police, etc.) and by rescuing infrastructure projects about to be deep sixed, saved construction and vendor jobs. But in this day and age, starting new projects takes time, and those projects and jobs are just starting to show up. But the number of jobs created as well as saved for infrastructure projects doubled in June over just a month before. And that growth is expected to continue.

There's more evidence, according to economist Josh Blivens of the Economic Policy Institute. Thanks in large measure to the Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Federal government spending grew at an 11% rate in the quarter, adding roughly 0.8% to overall GDP. State and local government spending grew at a 2.4% annual rate, the fastest growth since the middle of 2007. It is clear that the large amount of state aid contained in the ARRA made this growth possible.

Furthermore, real (inflation-adjusted) disposable personal income rose by 3.2% in the quarter, after rising by only 1% in the previous quarter. A large contribution to this increase was made by the Making Work Pay tax credit passed in conjunction with the ARRA, as this was the first full quarter that the credit was in effect. "

Blivens notes something else that's interesting, that major media doesn't mention. Though disposable income rose, it didn't translate into higher consumer spending. Why not? Because people are saving more (a sensible precaution and long term good thing.) Bliven points out that if more of the stimulus money had gone out as tax cuts or another round of stimulus checks as GOPers wanted, it's likely that money would also have gone into savings, and failed to stimulate the economy right away:

"This slippage between personal incomes and consumption spending caused by a rising savings rate makes plain that, instead of focusing on even more tax cuts, it was wise to make sure that much of the ARRA was devoted to direct public investment spending. The public investment spending in the ARRA, while not having a significant impact in the second quarter, will provide an even stronger boost to the economy in quarters to come."

Some of that spending is designed to strengthen the economy over the long term. It's a balancing act that a responsible Chief Executive must respect: people have immediate needs, and the economy has long term structural needs.

President Obama spoke to both of these concerns. "As far as I’m concerned, we will not have a recovery as long as we keep losing jobs. And I won’t rest until every American who wants a job can find one. But history shows that you need to have economic growth before you have job growth. And the report yesterday on our economy is an important sign that we’re headed in the right direction."

He said again (as USA Today noted) the economy needs a "new foundation" to ward off future crises.. including a better health care system, improved education and development of "a new clean energy economy."

Bliven is among those who believe even more federal economic stimulus would help, or is going to be needed. Certainly there are new challenges. Right now unemployment benefits are running out. States like California face economic as well as social catastrophes and chaos because of huge budget cuts and falling tax revenues. The ripples could send the national economy into another tailspin.

Both Sides Now

These amazing electric blue clouds are technically called noctilucent clouds. You know how some beautiful sunsets are caused by pollution in the air, but they're beautiful anyway, in a profoundly sad way? Same with these. They naturally occur in the Arctic, but this photo was taken in Spokane, WA (by Brian-Chilcoat, posted at Image Shack.) Writing as FishOutofWater at Daily Kos, he explains the physics and atmospheric science involved, but it comes down to this: "One reason for the recent spread of noctilucent clouds might be global warming...While greenhouse gases warm Earth's surface, they actually lower temperatures in the high atmosphere ...Arctic clouds appearing in the midlatitudes are a beautiful sign of climate change."

Stand With The President

There's a new little box over there in the left column. It says Stand with the President on Health Care, and below the symbol it says Declare Your Support. If you click on that, it takes you to BarackObama.com and the page about health care, where you can learn a bit more, see a short video and sign up to support the President.

President Obama needs your support, especially right now. The well-paid sharks are out to destroy health care reform once again. They're pouring money into the pockets of conservative Democrats as well as GOPers. The noise machine seems to be having an effect on poll numbers, which only emboldens them to get louder. So right now not only health care but the climate and energy bill and the rest of the agenda crucial for the future are imperiled.

But it's also not a time to give up hope. Mike Madden's summary and analysis at Salon is still sanguine on success, including the public option. President Obama responded to one Senate committee's proposal with another strong endorsement of the public option. "So you could still choose a private insurer, but we’d also have a public plan that you could choose from that would be non-for-profit, wouldn’t have, hopefully, some of the same high administrative costs, and would be potentially more responsive to your needs at a lower cost. I think that helps keep the insurance companies honest because now they have somebody to compete with."

He also confronted the noise machine's deliberate confusions, though with humor: "And I got a letter the other day from a woman; she said, I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare. (Laughter.) And I wanted to say, well, I mean, that’s what Medicare is, is it’s a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with. But I think that we’ve been so accustomed to hearing those phrases that sometimes we can’t sort out the myth from the reality."

That noise is obscuring very important reasons to support health care reform, as in this essay by a doctor who treats the disabled. The economics of it all come in sharper and more realistic focus in, for example, this article in Bloomberg that comes up with yet more numbers suggesting the cost of doing nothing far exceeds the cost of even the most expensive proposed reform plan.

Health care reform means not only more affordable insurance, and reforms to all insurance that allow portability and stop denial for preexisting conditions. It means lower costs for health care itself, more emphasis on preventive care and health rather than expensive medical practices. It's a big program for the same reason that the recovery act was big: it attacks not just present problems, but it makes positive structural changes and investments to start creating a better future.

People who oppose this include a pretty hefty proportion who are more interested in defeating President Obama and crippling his presidency than they are about opposing a health care bill. (After all, Congress gets great public health care, and the executives, lobbyists and media stars can afford the best insurance and care.) But in this they are right: if health care reform is defeated, it will be much harder to get other crucial legislation passed, like climate and energy.

So debating the details is useful, but in the end, standing with this President is of the greatest importance.

Consuming Hate

Haters and racists, loud and proud, crazed and relentless, are enabled and empowered by politicians--mostly from the White Supremacist Party (formerly known as Republicans) desperate for money from a dwindling base of now mostly haters and racists--and enabled and empowered by media, willing and even eager to amplify their hatred and racist swill, well beyond the point of the haters and racists advocating violence.

I repeat: it isn't just that these people are out there. It's that no one is restraining them, not even with disapproval or even feigned shock. All the media conglomerates care about is money--advertising money based on ratings. For that they are willing to allow and encourage the Limbaughs and the Becks and (if it's possible) worse to essentially advocate the violent overthrow of the elected government.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out this rundown on recent commentary by TMP. At Daily Kos, Meteor Blades asks the key question: " I wonder just how far they will let Beck go. Or spur him to. Will they give him a pass the day that he, like the Rwandan radio provocateurs of 15 years ago, starts calling Obama and his supporters "cockroaches" to be stamped out?"

He refers to the historical fact that the genocide in Rwanda was fueled by hate talk radio, in real time, as it was going on.

If something like that happened here--or something that seems to me to grow increasingly probable, an assassination attempt on the President--then we'll see the crocodile tears, and the anguished anchor consciences, and the rest of the sincere hypocrisy, and like the piles of guns that get turned in after an assassination, eventually it will be business as usual. Not until we learn that money is not an excuse for anything and everything, that encouraging ignorance is societally self-annihilating, and that society has to have some shared consciousness and conscience to survive.

But this time we can't afford to learn it the hard way. Unfortunately I believe Bruce Sterling is right when he wonders where the source of "hope" is, except Obama. It's true, there is no other hope.

Unfortunately I don't know what to do. Except pray for the Secret Service.

Update: There's an effort to organize a protest and/or boycott of corporate sponsors enabling Glenn Beck.

Grow Your Own

Our strawberry crop is sub-par so far, but the potatoes are tremendous.

Sunday Reading

Newsweek articles on the economy, especially the lead one by Daniel Gross--why the Great Recession may technically be over but only because the Obama Recovery Act and other federal measures prevented it from getting far worse. Why the stimulus takes awhile to generate jobs and why recovery on the ground may be slow, but once recovery gets going, is designed to be sustainable for the future:

The Obama administration's strategy rests on what some might call industrial policy or excessive government intervention—or even creeping socialism. I call it "the smart economy." It means eschewing the blunt economic instruments we've always used and focusing resources and rhetoric on strategic sectors: renewable energy/green technology, infrastructure, broadband, and health care. It means making investments to run vital systems more intelligently and efficiently, thus creating a new infrastructure on which the private sector can work its magic.

I don't always endorse the views of Bill Maher but this column on Huffington Post is an almost perfect combination of wit and sense, which is to say, he agrees with my analysis. It begins:

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

And in tracing the trend since Reagan for privatization etc. ("Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations.") he takes on the ugly destructive spectre of health care for profit. To which I add:La salute non si paga! Health is not for sale!

Along the way, Maher comments on the hypocritical elegies about how Walter Cronkite was the end of an era, which never mention that one major reason for better reporting in the Cronkite era (though it was seldom probing, it was serious): in the Cronkite era the network news division wasn't supposed to make a profit, it was a public service to report serious information that Americans needed to know to intelligently govern themselves. ( "In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies. ")

Cronkite and the news are also the subject of Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times: "Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank."

Update: A Paul Krugman column lays out the economic reasons why markets alone can't cure heathcare. His conclusion:

"There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence."

So let me repeat: La salute non si paga: health is not for sale!