Yes, Virginia, the Affordable Care Act is already paid for.

The GOP race to reward the wealthy.

Ezra Klein:

There are two very different tax-policy conversations playing out in the Republican Party right now. In Washington, House Republicans are arguing with each other over how small of a temporary tax cut to give the middle class. Out on the primary trail, the Republican presidential candidates are arguing over how huge of a permanent tax cut to give the wealthy.

How Doctors Die.

Last week I wrote a post called “Remembering Our History” that recalls the way young liberal activists of the 1960s and 1970s — the New Left — kicked apart the New Deal Coalition and thereby helped make the Democratic Party the lame and spineless thing it has been in recent years. I don’t want to repeat that entire argument, so if you want to disagree with that premise, please read the earlier post first.

Today some west coast OWSers are planning to shut down some ports, temporarily blocking commerce to punish some of the 1 percent. But other OWSers, and unions that have been supportive of OWS, are saying this would punish a lot of working people, too. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

And some occupation activists are labeling it as too confrontational, with the protest’s potential for violence detracting from Occupy’s stated intention of narrowing the chasm between rich and poor.

“Support is one thing,” Robert McEllrath, president of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, wrote to his members last week. “Outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process.”

Not the 1 percent

The Alameda County Building and Construction Trades Council’s secretary-treasurer, Andreas Cluver, said many of his union’s workers were recently hired at port building projects after long stretches on unemployment. Given that, a port shutdown aimed at punishing the 1 percent “makes no sense,” he said.

He said no union at the port supports the shutdown.

“We’re extremely supportive of the message of Occupy Oakland, and we did come out to support the Nov. 2 general strike, but we’re not behind this one,” Cluver said. “When working people aren’t involved in the decision on whether to shut down their jobs at the port, that’s problematic. And we weren’t consulted. Losing a day of wages is hard.”

He added: “The port is a public entity. It’s really not the 1 percent. Go shut down a country club – that’s the 1 percent.”

Together, the unions represent more than 1,400 workers at the port. Other unions that have refused to endorse the shutdown, including the California Nurses Association, declined to comment – all apparently not wanting to antagonize protest organizers.

However, at FDL, hotflashcarol is calling bullshit. And she’s doing this by recalling her personal memories of the 1960s counterculture — which is kind of pathetic, considering she was only 8 years old during the Summer of Love, although she did get to Haight Ashbury then while 17-year-old me was stuck in the Ozarks. But to counter the opposition of the unions to the port shutdown, she trots out speeches from the 1960s New Left. This includes speeches by Mario Salvo (1942-1996) who was a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech movement.

Mario Savio included “organized labor” in his list of those running the odious machine, the machine that we must not stop passively, but must stop by putting our bodies upon the gears:

be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone!

After he gave that famous speech, Mario was arrested, along with 800 others, and sentenced to 120 days in Santa Rita Jail – the very same place some of us may find ourselves occupying tomorrow. I have never been arrested and I’d like to keep it that way. But I am willing to march with heroes like Scott Olsen and all the others who have been arrested and brutalized. I am willing to take that risk, especially to support the people who man the front lines and push through the police barricades and refuse to allow the state to have every single ounce of the power. Without them, who among us would have had the guts to be the first one to sit at that lunch counter or stand up on top of that police car and demand our right to free speech?

Historically, labor activists have put their bodies on the line — sometimes at the cost of their lives — a whole lot more than the counterculture ever did, but let’s go on … One of my points in the earlier post was that in the 1960s, the unions were run by a bunch of old white guys who were standing in the way of progress for racial minorities and women, and some among them were pretty corrupt, and there was good reason to stand up to the unions then.

But that was 40 bleeping years ago. The unions today ain’t your granddaddy’s unions, child. Our current state of economic injustice is very much linked to the decline of the unions, and re-empowering workers through union organizing is one of the keys to turning things around.

Hotflashcarol goes on to post a video of Angela Davis ca. 1970 discussing the violence she grew up with as a black child in North Carolina. Hotflashcarol seems to be implying that what Angela Davis and her family went through in the 1950s and 1960s South justifies whatever confrontations OWS wants to mount today.

But what blacks experienced in the South back then is in a different ball park from what the mostly white and mostly middle-class OWSers have faced even on their worst days. Back then, a few wrong words or even a hint of attitude could get a black person killed, and any white could murder any African American with impunity, because no all-white jury would convict him even if the all-white police force arrested him, or the all-white public prosecutors decided to try him. That’s what Angela Davis experienced.

Like I said, what OWS has been through isn’t anywhere in the same ball park. Nay, the same galaxy. Yes, there are free speech and public assembly issues to be addressed, but these need to be taken through the court system before any counter-violence is justified.

Repeat after me: It’s not the sixties any more. Many things have changed.

Oh, and there’s another video at hotflashcarol’s post from about 1968 that’s supposed to make some kind of point, although it’s not clear to me what.

Hotflashcarol strikes me as a relatively privileged person who has romantic fantasies of being a rebel. She refers to herself as a blond at one point, so I assume she is white. Reliving one’s youth can be fun, although I take it my youth was a lot less fun than hers. But the world is a very different place now, and like it or not, activists like Mario Savio helped bring about the rise of Reaganism and the stagnation of the working class we’re seeing today. (Again, if you don’t understand how that happened, read my earlier post.)

The absolutely last thing any lefty activist ought to be doing TODAY is dissing unions and causing working people to lose a day’s pay so that the activist can have lots of fun playing at being a revolutionary and maybe getting on YouTube. If OWS is not actively trying to gain the sympathy and support of working people, on behalf of working people, then what is its purpose?

If you are a Boomer itching to relive your youth, go light some patchouli incense and listen to Jimi Hendrix for awhile. And then get over the past and ask yourself what you can do TODAY for the working people being screwed by the system TODAY. The 1960s are OVER, people.

Update: This via Shakesville — Reuters writes,

But union workers were largely expected to stay on the job, and were contractually barred from joining such a strike. The protest will focus in part on truck drivers who earn low wages and cannot join unions because they are classified as independent truck drivers, and must provide their own trucks.

“It’s a group that encapsulates basically everything that is wrong with society,” [Mike King, a graduate student who acts as a media liaison for Occupy Oakland] said.

So, part of the stated purpose of the port shut-down is to support low-wage workers who can’t unionize. Somebody needs to explain that to hotflashcarol. The problem with a lot of big, messy, unfocused demonstrating is that while their original purpose may have been perfectly righteous, once the vocational protesters show up everybody forgets what that was.

Update: See also Laura Clawson for Daily Kos —

It’s true that there are some terribly exploitative conditions at ports, especially for short haul truckers. But doing something in the name of workers without consulting the workers involved, and despite opposition even from a very militant union, is disrespectful of workers at best.

Once again demonstrating they don’t know the Bill of Rights from Longhorn Pie, the state of Texas has approved this vanity plate design:

Of course, to be in constitutional compliance Texas would have to offer plates for people who are not Christian. I’m betting a few live in Texas. I’m proposing the following designs:

Of course, actually putting one of the alternative plates on one’s car would no doubt incite some born-again yahoo to slash one’s tires.

To Texas’s credit, it nixed a Confederate flag plate proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I understand the Sons are suing.

Just read Richard Adams.

You’ve heard that the U.S. spends more on health care than anywhere else on the planet. If you want to see this for yourself, spend some time with this page of charts, graphs and tables compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And what makes the amount we spend even more pathetic is that our overall results do not stand up to that of other nations that spend far less.

Now the Global Health Leadership Institute points out that while we spend much more on health care costs than those other countries, we spend a great deal less on other social services — “rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.”

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

What’s more, America is one of only three industrialized countries to spend the majority of its health and social services budget on health care itself. For every dollar we spend on health care, we spend an additional 90 cents on social services. In our peer countries, for every dollar spent on health care, an additional $2 is spent on social services. So not only are we spending less, we’re allocating our resources disproportionately on health care.

Our study found that countries with high health care spending relative to social spending had lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than countries that favored social spending. While the stagnating life expectancy in the United States remains at 78 years, in many European countries it has leapt to well over 80 years, and several countries boast infant mortality rates approximately half of ours. In a national survey conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, four out of five physicians agreed that unmet social needs led directly to worse health.

This suggests to me that one of the several factors driving up health care costs is our low rate of “safety net” support for people in need. Here’s an eye-opening statistic:

The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program tracked the medical expenses of 119 chronically homeless people for several years. In one five-year period, the group accounted for 18,834 emergency room visits estimated to cost $12.7 million.

In other words, it would almost certainly be less expensive to the rest of us to provide the 119 with basic shelter, food and health care than to just leave them on the streets. And there’s a chance some of them could become self-sufficient with a little help.

The conservative argument is that benefit programs make people lazy and dependent. So what does being chronically sick and cut off from health care (other than emergency rooms when they’re in crisis) make them?

My suspicions are that there is some optimum amount of government social services that gives you the best overall result for the buck, and trying to get by more cheaply just shifts costs somewhere else. So the “saving” is an illusion. In fact, the “saving” may be driving costs even higher.

The other argument a conservative might make (albeit with different framing) is that if the Glorious Free Market isn’t finding a place for some people, then they are surplus population that should just die already. Because, you know, people exist to serve the needs of the Holy Free Market Economy, not the other way around.

That kind of thinking is the only way conservative ideology makes sense.

David Brooks dutifully attempts to put lipstick on the pig –

Of all the major Republicans, the one who comes closest to my worldview is Newt Gingrich. Despite his erratically shifting views and odd phases, he continually returns to this core political refrain: He talks about using government in energetic but limited ways to increase growth, dynamism and social mobility.

However, there are places even a professional GOP shill like Bobo won’t go.

So why am I not more excited by the Gingrich surge?

In the first place, Gingrich loves government more than I do. He has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor. For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon’s resources.” He has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”

Seriously?

This is Rick Perry’s genuinely disgusting ad that he hopes will win him back the bigot social conservative vote in Iowa.

If you don’t want to watch it, here is the transcript:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.”

Here is a response:

Was it really faith that made America strong? Or attitude?

Yesterday I was cleaning out a closet and stumbled on the May 2006 issue of The American Prospect. And there’s an article in it called “Party in Search of a Notion” by Michael Tomasky that I don’t remember reading, but now I wish I could afford to have copies made and hand them out to all progressive and liberal activists in the U.S., including OWSers, with certain parts highlighted for special attention.

First, here is the basic argument Tomasky makes –

For many years — during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society — the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today’s. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea — the philosophical principle — that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest.

Tomasky has quite a lot of text supporting this argument, the important point being that for a long time most citizens, meaning more specifically most white middle-class citizens, accepted this basic premise — that good government requires citizens to contribute to something — their nation; the commonweal; whatever — larger than themselves.

That was the glue that tied the Democrats together as a party and won the support of the public for progressive legislation, through the New Deal to the Great Society. But when that ideal was lost, the Dems were reduced to “their grab bag of small-bore proposals that so often seek not to offend and that accept conservative terms of debate.”

And here is the little bit of history that I think most of you know, but I want all of today’s progressives to understand (emphases added):

The old liberalism got America out of depression, won the war against fascism, built the middle class, created global alliances, and made education and health care far closer to universal than they had ever been. But there were things it did not do; its conception of the common good was narrow — completely unacceptable, in fact, to us today. Japanese Americans during World War II and African Americans pretty much ever were not part of that common good; women were only partially included. Because of lack of leadership and political expediency (Roosevelt needing the South, for example), this liberalism had betrayed liberal principle and failed millions of Americans. Something had to give.

At first, some Democrats — Johnson and Humphrey, for example, and even some Republicans back then — tried to expand the American community to include those who had been left behind. But the political process takes time, and compromise; young people and black people and poor people were impatient, and who could blame them? By 1965, ’66, ’67, the old liberalism’s failures, both domestically and in Vietnam, were so apparent as to be crushing. A new generation exposed this “common good” as nothing more than a lie to keep power functioning, so as not to disturb the “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” that Herbert Marcuse described in 1964 in one of the more memorable phrases of the day. Activists at the time were convinced — and they were not particularly wrong — that the old liberalism, far from nurturing a civic sphere in which all could deliberate and whose bounty all could enjoy, had created this unfreedom. The only response was to shatter it.

That was the work, of course, of New Left groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the (post-1965) Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and a host of others. Other activists opposed the shattering — to the contrary, their goal was to make the Democratic Party more inclusive. But even this more salutary impulse could be excessive, as with the famous example of the Cook County delegation to the 1972 Democratic Convention, in which, of the 59 delegates, only three were Poles. Many in the Democratic Party of that era opposed these attempts at inclusion and new social-justice efforts vehemently. But in time, the party rid itself of those elements, and some of the ’60s activists became Democratic operatives and even politicians. The stance of radical oppositionism dissipated as the ’60s flamed out; but the belief system, which devalued the idea of the commons, held fast and became institutionalized within the Democratic Party. The impact on the party was that the liberal impulse that privileged social justice and expansion of rights was now, for the first time, separated entirely from the civic-republican impulse of the common good. By the 1970s, some social programs — busing being the most obvious example — were pursued not because they would be good for every American, but because they would expand the rights of some Americans. The old Johnsonian formulation was gone. Liberalism, and the Democratic Party, lost the language of advancing the notion that a citizen’s own interest, even if that citizen did not directly benefit from such-and-such a program, was bound up in the common interest. Democrats were now asking many people to sacrifice for a greater good of which they were not always a part.

Toss in inflation, galloping under a new Democratic president; a public, especially a white urban public, tiring of liberal failures on the matters of crime and decline; the emergence of these new things, social issues, which hadn’t been very central to politics before but became a permanent fixture of the landscape now; the Iranian hostage crisis; and the funding on a huge scale, unprecedented in our history, of a conservative intellectual class and polemical apparatus. Toss in also the rise of interest-group pluralism: the proliferation of single-issue advocacy organizations. All supported good causes, but their dominance intensified the stratification. They presented Democrats with questionnaires to fill out, endorsements to battle for, sentences to be inserted into speeches, and favors to be promised — and not just at election time; but even more importantly, when it came time to govern.

In short, the ideal of the common good was sacrificed for a worthwhile reason — the New Deal status quo excluded racial minorities and women. But it was replaced by the perception that various interest groups had to fight each other for a slice of a finite pie. And as Tomasky goes on to explain, this perception became the horse Reagan rode in on.

But, to a large extent, it was liberal activists of the 1960s and 1970s who bred and raised that horse.

Why do I think this is important? First, as much as OWS seems to want to emulate the old New Left (and they are doing that, even though some may deny it) it would be really good if they could understand what the New Left got wrong, so that they don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Second, in our continuing argument about why the Democratic Party is so lame, I cannot emphasize enough the role that 1960s and 1970s liberal activists played in shattering the old New Deal coalition, after which most of them walked away from party politics and left the Dems a party with little in the way of a base. The Dems were thus left to go to this interest group and that, hat in hand, for money and support. And often they were lining up for the second biggest check, after the one Republicans got. So if you want to know why the two parties seem to always pull in the same direction, this is why.

Third, it became gospel among Democrats that they had to continue to disown the old liberalism, especially in presidential politics, because the presidential candidates who had the nerve to be unabashedly liberal — Fritz Mondale comes to mind — or who could be painted as such — Michael Dukakis — were defeated by landslides. The only Democratic candidates who won between Johnson and Obama were Carter and Clinton, and these guys both did plenty of compromising and appeasing to conservatism and in many ways were more like pre-Goldwater Republicans than New Deal Democrats.

Today’s young progressive activists often evoke the memory of FDR and seem to want to go back to New Deal-type governance, and I’m fine with that. But there are certain realities that have to be addressed.

One, it took us many years to get into this mess. It will take us at least a few years to get out of it. Those who throw up their hands ad quit after just one election didn’t change much are fools.

Second, like it or not, if you want to change government, you either do it through established political processes or you stage a revolution. The problem with revolutions — beside being messy and violent — is that when you break up the old system you introduce chaos, and there are no guarantees you will maintain control of what emerges from that chaos. And I’m saying, we don’t need to re-invent the wheel here.

However, working through established political processes means getting involved in elections. It also means getting involved in party politics. If you want the Democratic Party to be more like the party of FDR (albeit with more diversity and equal rights for everyone), then get involved in the Democratic Party and work to make it the party you want it to be.

Because, I’m telling you, perpetually keeping aloof from the party while bitching and moaning and voting for Ralph Nader or some other political outsider to “send a message” — which I’ve seen progressives do for the past forty bleeping years — ain’t workin’.

Regarding President Obama — in many ways Obama actually does lean in a more progressive direction than either of his two Democratic predecessors, if you look at the three presidents honestly and knowledgeably. Even so, until there is a solid progressive majority in Congress, even FDR himself couldn’t have accomplished much more than Obama has accomplished. And that’s not an excuse; that’s reality.

I keep referring to this chart I found on Nate Silver’s old site; might as well publish it here –

When you appreciate that a chunk of Obama’s Democrats are Blue Dogs who vote with Republicans, and that the picture is even worse after the 2010 midterms, you ought to be able to see that comparisons to FDR are not entirely fair. This isn’t to say that Obama hasn’t deserved criticism, but frankly, I don’t see any other nationally recognizable Dem who might have won in 2008 who would have done any better with this Congress — including Hillary Clinton.

Finally, I agree with Tomasky that re-valuing the common good is the most essential thing those of us who call ourselves liberals or progressives can be doing now. Elizabeth Warren is particularly good at expressing herself in the context of a common good and is a great role model for doing this.

And what we need to stop doing is re-playing the old New Left tapes.

As Col. Sherman T. Potter used to say — “mule fritters.”

I got an email today from a group called the Georgia Gun Owners announcing that their pet legislation, the Constitutional Carry Act, has been “pre-filed” in the Georgia legislature. According to the email, the Act will –

• Eliminate the mandatory intrusive government requirement for background checks of law-abiding Georgia gun owners;

Um, then how would you know they are law-abiding? Because they say so?

• Eliminate the mandatory requirement for taxes or “fees” be paid to county governments across the state, some of which add up to more than $100;

But if they can’t afford that, how can they afford to buy firearms?

• Eliminate mandatory government fingerprinting requirements;
• Eliminate mandatory trips to county probate courts in order to carry openly or concealed;
• Eliminate mandatory county government-imposed weapons license waiting periods;
• Leave the current Georgia Weapons Carry License in place as a voluntary license, for the sake of reciprocity; the license will no longer be mandatory to carry open or concealed in Georgia.

So, in other words, never mind if you are an escaped convict or are on a terrorist watch list. If this thing passes (and I have no idea what its chances are), you can waltz into any gun shop in Georgia, declare yourself to be a law-abiding citizen, and get yourself armed.

“Law-abiding citizens should not have to be fingerprinted and cataloged like common criminals just to be able to defend themselves, their family and their property.

In this day and age, with our firearms rights under full-fledged attack from Washington, and even here in the State, it’s time to finally remove the government-imposed barriers to private protection and self-defense,” said State Rep. Jason Spencer.

It must be rough on the mean streets of Marietta these days. But I don’t know what “full-fledged attack from Washington” he’s talking about; there’s been no movement from either Congress or the White House to pass any sort of firearm restriction for some time. The only “attack” has been concocted in the paranoid imagination of Wayne LaPierre.

As I’ve written in the past, in the U.S. there really isn’t a robust correlation between firearm fatality rates and firearm laws, one way or another. However, there is a correlation between firearm ownership rates and firearm fatalities. Higher rates of gun ownership within a state mean higher rates of gun fatalities.

So, while an armed society may or may not be a polite society, it is certainly a more dangerous society than a less armed one, even for the law-abiding citizens.

But while a prospective gun buyer must be presumed law-abiding until he shoots somebody, higher and higher standards of certification are being piled on prospective voters. Kay Dilday writes,

The NAACP will be sending a delegation to the United Nations Commissioner of Human Rights alleging a concerted effort to deny voting rights to black and hispanic Americans. Given how rarely anyone in the United States looks to the United Nations for justice, and how often the United States ignores the UN, this is both a significant and futile effort. But what’s at issue is so egregious that the NAACP has chosen to shout it from a global stage.

You know the story — in order to combat a phony “voter fraud” crisis, states are writing laws demanding that voters jump through more and more hoops to prove they are legitimate voters. And, of course, the populations most affected are poor, black, and latino. And if taxes and fees required of gun purchasers are outrageous, what about requirements to purchase a state ID card (for a fee), for which you need a certified copy of your birth certificate (another fee)?

See also:

“League of Women Voters takes on ‘myths about voter impersonation’”

“Robert Ehrlich Aide Guilty Of Conspiring To Suppress Black Voter Turnout”

“Students hit by voter ID restrictions”

“Voter ID Laws ‘Assault’ On Minority Voters, Says DNC Chair (VIDEO)”

Rep. Hank Johnson, “Suppressing Votes Is Not Right”