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Blanche Lincoln's website says she supports the public option

Chris Bowers — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:20:12 GMT

(Via Wonkroom) Not only did Blanche Lincoln sign a document stating that she supported the public option, according to her Senate website, she is still cool with the public option:

Health care reform must build upon what works and improve inefficiencies. Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals of a public plan.

And here's a screenshot:

Blanche Lincoln is a liar. She signs a document stating that she supports the public option. Her website says that she would be fine with a public option. And then she does on the floor of the Senate, and promises to filibuster any bill with a public option.

There is still a real possibility that Lincoln could face a high-profile primary challenge next year. The challenger won't be a great progressive, but would still be an improvement over the lying Blanche Lincoln. Further, Arkansas remains a Democratic state at all but the Presidential level, and so that primary challenger might very well have a better chance in the general election than Lincoln.

Let's hope that primary challenge starts sooner, rather than later. Blanche Lincoln is a lair, and needs to be removed from office.

This is also an open thread on the health care vote tonight, which passed 60-39. Senator Voinovich of Ohio did not attend.

An Interview with Matthew Hoh

dcrowe — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:00:00 GMT

If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:

The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.

Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. That's roughly twice the per-troop cost in Iraq. We've suffered well more than 800 deaths in Afghanistan. And yet here is the former top civilian official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a former Marine who served in Anbar province in Iraq, telling us that the presence of our ground forces does nothing to defeat the organization that's supposedly the target of our operations in that country.

So, if we're not going about the business of defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what are we doing?

We're involved in a civil war in Afghanistan. We're only taking one side in that civil war. And, our presence there is only encouraging the civil war to go on.

Hmm. This is all sounding very familiar.

I spoke to Matthew on Friday afternoon by phone. My first call to him went straight to voicemail, where I learned that apparently he'd had so many press calls about his resignation letter that his voicemail message directed inquiries on that topic to his email address. If you recall, the State Department took his letter seriously enough that it prompted job offers from Ambassadors Eikenberry and Holbrooke to get him to stay. Since then, Hoh has been the focus of a great deal of media attention, and for good reasons:

With all the rhetoric about the "success" of the so-called "surge" in Iraq and its supposed lessons for Afghanistan, the opinion of a person with experience with both has a lot of heft;
The fact that his feelings about the situation were strong enough to provoke a resignation and a subsequent rejection of a position in Washington gave him moral authority; and
Hoh was the beneficiary of good timing: his resignation came at a time when the media and policymakers had been cajoled into a willingness to entertain views outside the Washington, D.C. conventional wisdom that failure to send more troops immediately would lead to disaster.

Over the course of the past year, groups opposed to deepening U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan (such as Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan project, the Get Afghanistan Right coalition and many other groups and individuals) worked relentlessly to keep a critical perspective on the war in Afghanistan in the public debate. These escalation opponents relentlessly hammered the proponents of a counterinsurgency (COIN) effort for their inconsistencies and self-contradictions, especially with regard to the COIN doctrine's need for a legitimate host-nation partner. By the time the Afghan presidential elections exploded into a showcase of abject corruption and illegitimacy, these activists had laid the groundwork that helped the American people interpret the events of late August 2009 as a serious blow to the assumptions underlying the rationale for a deep military involvement. At the same time, President Obama refused to be rushed into a second troop increase in Afghanistan by an increasingly abrasive Pentagon whisper campaign, allowing the nation to take a collective breath and widen the debate about options. These factors, combined with cratering public support for the war effort, pushed policymakers and the media into a willingness to entertain views dissenting from those presented by General Stanley McChrystal. Enter Matthew Hoh.

Matthew's letter is a four-page punch in the gut to the rhetoric of pro-counterinsurgency factions. It wrecks the idea that the U.S. will ever have a legitimate partner (referred to by the COIN field manual as a "north star") in Afghanistan or that our strategy will lead to the destruction of al-Qaida. He ends the letter with regret that assurances can no longer be given that those who died in Afghanistan gave their lives in a mission worth the cost in "futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept."

Hoh sees our presence driving the conflict in at least two ways. On one hand, our military support for the corrupt Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan assures the Kabul cartel that we will not allow them to be overrun by insurgents. Because of that perception, the GoIRA is not willing to work out a political settlement with their opponents to form a true national government. The support we have given thus far (which is very close to the maximum possible support we can give), however, is not enough to allow the GoIRA to crush the insurgency totally. Thus, within the constraints on U.S. and Afghan national power, the only possible solution to the conflict other than strategic failure is a political solution negotiated between GoIRA and it's opponents--and that's precisely what the GoIRA won't seek as long as they can be assured of our continued military support.

[T]he only way to end this civil war is through political reconciliation, through some kind of political negotiation reaching to some kind of settlement. ...The Afghan officials who are on our side have no interest in doing that. ...They have no interest in giving up the position they have right now. And our presence there keeps them in power that way. I don't really see them having any interest in taking Afghanistan into, you know, a modern age or a progressive country, all of the things we believed we were doing there for the past 8 years.

On the other hand, the U.S. presence fuels the ever-expanding insurgency, pulling people who resent our support for a corrupt, predatory government and who intensely resent outside interference in their lives into conflict with coalition troops.

In both the east and the south, where our troops were heavily engaged in combat...on a daily basis, those are areas populated by rural Pashtuns...The bulk of those people were fighting us just because we're occupying them--not out of any ideology, not out of any real ties to the Taliban, not out of any hatred for the West. It was just because they did not want foreign troops, or, for that matter, the Afghan national army or Afghan national police, which do not represent them, in their valleys and villages.

...If you take the Korengal Valley, for example, which is well-known to the American people as "The Valley of Death," ...it's 15-20 miles long, it only has about 10,000 residents, they speak Korengali...these are people who are not interested in things outside their valley. They prefer to be left alone. Of course, putting more troops in their valley is something they're going to rebel against, especially troops from the central government, which does not represent them. ...It's really a question of these people wanting to determine their own existence and ...govern themselves. For every Korengal we're in, there's a hundred that we're not in, and if we were in [them], it would be the same issue of us having to fight them only because we're occupying them.

On the topic of that corrupt, unrepresentative government, Hoh offered a couple of anecdotal examples of the corruption that permeates every level of government in Afghanistan:

I know a USAID official who got into a plane...with the governor of his province, and the governor had about $300,000 in a duffel bag with him. ...The governor that I worked with had been removed from another province as the governor because he had been caught red-handed in a fairly extreme corruption case. Now this governor, Governor Sari, has been a friend of President Karzai for 35 years. So, after the U.S. embassy exposed this and complained about it, all Karzai did was move this governor...from one province to another province....To believe that the vast majority of Afghan officials that you're working with have any allegiance to what we're trying to do other than to enrich themselves or to make out in some manner is wrong.

I asked Hoh about the recent report on the quadrupling of the insurgency since 2006. According to at least one estimate, 10 percent of the estimated 25,000-man-strong insurgency were hardcore religious extremists, while the rest accepted training and funds from the "Taliban," but lacked ties to their ideology or broader agenda beyond throwing out the invaders.

I completely agree. The number I've seen is that there are 25,000 "Taliban" (which I believe is an incorrect term to apply to the people who are fighting us because it makes a reference to the Taliban regime of pre-September 11, 2001, and I think that misleads people and causes confusion, particularly among the American public about who we are actually fighting there.). But if you go with that 25,000 number...only a few thousand of those are actual hardcore "Taliban" with a capital "T." The majority of the rest of those groups are local fighters who are pretty independent of one another, just primarily concerned with their local areas, their valleys, their village, and who are tied to the Taliban with a capital "T" only through monetary or funding allegiances, and through a desire not to be occupied by a foreign power or by the other side in a civil war.

...But, if there are 25,000 troops now, Derrick...if we put more troops into the south, if we put 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000 troops into the south, next year there will be 30,000, 35,000 or 40,000 enemies fighting us. As we move into more valleys and more villages...people are going to rebel against us.

So, the continued presence of massive numbers of U.S. troops removes the incentives for the GoIRA to negotiate a political settlement while providing the fuel for the growth of the insurgency. Hoh's advice to policymakers? End combat operations and sharply reduce U.S. troop levels. Doing so would pull U.S. troops out of areas where locals fight us just because we are there and would compel the GoIRA to negotiate with their opponents. Otherwise the U.S. presence will continue to fuel an unsustainable dynamic whereby the GoIRA has a near-term upper hand but cannot decisively defeat their opponents while the opponents use our presence as a recruiting tool for the resistance movement.

You're either characterized as all in our all out, and that's wrong. I don't think anyone is calling for us to completely wash our hands of Afghanistan and just walk away. When I call for withdrawal I call for stopping combat operations because it just doesn't make any sense; all it does it just prolong the conflict. I call for some kind of political reconciliation to end the fighting there. So a withdrawal would have to be somewhat gradual while negotiations were going on.

But wait, one might ask: what about al-Qaida? Hoh's policy prescription deals mainly with settling the civil war between the "Taliban" and the GoIRA. How does al-Qaida fit into this? Aren't they the reason we're in Afghanistan in the first place? Wouldn't our withdraw allow them to reestablish "safe havens" and allow them to keep the ones they have in Pakistan?

I don't believe al-Qaida needs or wants safe havens [like they had in 2001]. They just don't operate that way. they recruit worldwide. They are really an ideological force that exists on the Internet. They influence individuals or their operations are carried out by these small, independent, autonomous cells that really don't require much to operate other than a couple of rooms and a satellite phone or an internet connection. and if you look at the vast majority of attacks that have happened over the last decade regarding al-Qaida, they've been carried out by people not from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, but residents of North Africa, residents of the gulf states or citizens of Europe or citizens and residents of the United States who do their preparation and their training in countries where the attacks occur. So this idea of a safe haven and their requirement for it is not borne out by any evidence of the way al-Qaida has operated for at least the last decade. After 2001, they evolved. They don't need a safe haven. It would be great for the United States if they did have safe havens because then we could bomb them. So we have to attack al-Qaida as the organization as it exists and not as we want it to exist.

The concern that our presence their encourages people to respond to their ideology is a valid one. We're currently occupying two Muslim countries, and we have to understand that lends credence to al-Qaida's argument that it is defending the Muslim world from Western invasion.

How many recruits do they [al-Qaida] get per year? A hundred? Two hundred? The Muslim population is over a billion. You're talking about such a small fraction. It's really associated with such a fringe movement that we have to attack using human intelligence and using law enforcement techniques. Army brigade combat teams do not affect al-Qaida. Having 60,00 troops in Afghanistan is not affecting al-Qaida. ...[T]he destruction of al-Qaida should be our priority...but we need to go after that organization as it exists and not with ground combat troops in Afghanistan.

Matthew said he's pleased with the state of debate following his resignation and return to the United States.

I can tell you that one of the things that pushed me to resign was this feeling that I had, and I think most people had, or a lot of people had, particularly guys I was serving with in Afghanistan, that an escalation of troops and an open-ended commitment to supporting the Karzai regime seemed almost like a done deal all throughout the summer...There was no discussion of any other type of strategy...it seemed almost like a guarantee...I got home in September and that's when I first heard there were debates on this within the administration...I'm very pleased the way the debates have been going. I'm not sure what's going that's going to happen with [the troop ]increase--I'm sure we're going to get one. The best thing though ...is that we're going to get some kind of withdrawal date, which is what we need. If we can get a withdrawal date within a year or two I'll be very happy, because that's so much better, so infinitely better, than some type of open-ended commitment or some type of 4- or 5-year plan. My thoughts are hopefully we can get some type of commitment to withdraw and stop combat operations within the next year or two.

I guess that's being a realist. I'd like to see it stop tomorrow.

Brave New Conversations recently filmed a conversation between Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg. Here's a clip:

You can find the full episode on the Brave New Conversations website.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.

Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. He blogs regularly at Return Good for Evil.

California's higher education crisis: "Shock Doctrine" in action

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The student protests of the 32% fee increases approved by the University of California Board of Regents this week are notable for many reasons, not least because they are one of the few mass responses to widespread applications of the "Shock Doctrine" in the wake of massive budget cutbacks at the state and local level. First a quick review of how massively irresponsibility in drafting the stimulus set the stage for this event--and many similar cutbacks that have gone relatively unnoticed. Then, on the flip, a look at the fee hikes in historical perspective as part of a long-term process of privatization.

As I argued back during the stimulus debate, the failure to use federal dollars to help close state budget gaps was a terrible mistake. First off, every dollar taken out of state spending roughly offsets the stimulative effect of every dollar spent by the Federal government--meaning that until you've closed the state budget gaps (either actually or virtually), every dollar of stimulus spending accomplishes roughly nothing. I say "roughly," because the stimulative effect of spending a dollar can very tremendously, as shown in this chart from a Feb 4 diary:

So, $100 billion to extend the Bush tax cuts forever instead of assisting state governments would cost the economy roughly 700,000 jobs. If the $100 billion were used for temporary across-the-board tax cuts, it would "only" have cost about 230,000 jobs.

But making matters even worse than the massive loss in jobs saved or created alone, the state budget culs have wrecked havoc with all manner of state and local agencies and the services they provide. In many cases, the loss of continuity of service is itself quite costly, although ways of measuring these costs are partial and pimative at best. But one thing is quite clear--when the cost is cut-backs in higher education, that cost will continue to be paid for years, if not decades into the future in the form of lost productivity in a less educated and less cretive workforce--at the every least.
While state government budget cuts precipitated the crisis, the UC system actually has enough money to weather the storm, if that were it's priority, according to Bob Samuels, president of the University of California, American Federation of Teachers, who appeared as a guest on Democracy Now! this Friday on a segment,"As UC Regents Approve Major Tuition Hike, Students, Faculty Decry Erosion of Public Education in CA and Nationwide". Here is a portion of the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, just explain the situation right now. Why are these student hikes? What's the justification for the 32 percent increase in student fees?
BOB SAMUELS: Well, President Yudof, the president of the University of California system, says that because of state cut to the UC budget from 20 percent of the state contribution, which is-the state only contributes about-contributes only about 15 percent of the total budget, but because of that cut, they say they have to raise student fees. And our argument has been that this is actually a record year of revenue for the UC system, and the problem is they just don't want to spend the money on instruction. So what they're doing instead-
AMY GOODMAN: How could it be a record year?
BOB SAMUELS: They brought in a lot of money from the federal stimulus money. They had a record year in their research grants. They had a record year in medical profits. Most of their money is brought in by selling parking, housing and medical services throughout California. So they had a record year in that revenue. They had a record year in grants. And so, actually, last year they ended up getting more money than before from the state, because they got the federal stimulus money.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is the justification then? Explain further where that money goes.
BOB SAMUELS: Well, you know, the university says that it's poor, that it can't spend money from its other areas on students, on instructions, and so it has to basically-what it's doing now is laying off hundreds of faculty members, especially the non-tenured lecturers, and it's increasing class size.
And money is being funneled into the compensation of the star faculty and the star administrators, because in the UC system there's over 3,000 people who make over $200,000. And many of them make $400,000, $500,000. A lot of them are mostly administrators and staff, and so the university has-basically has fewer and fewer faculty, more and more students and more and more administrators.
And so, what's going to happen is it takes students longer to graduate. They can't get the classes they need. And I teach required writing classes at UCLA, and they just laid off our entire department. And we have required classes, so we don't know what they're going to do. And the dean of our division told us the university simply does not have money for undergraduate education.
....
One of the stories I want to talk about is just that UC lost over $23 billion in investments in the last two years. And one reason why it lost so much money is that it invested heavily in toxic assets and in real estate. And it followed the Yale model of investing in these high-risk assets, and at first it gained a lot of money. And what's happening across the country are universities, especially the private universities, they're losing so much money in their endowments that they're having to raise, once again, their tuition and also cut classes, cut faculty, and especially the non-tenure track faculty are the most vulnerable. And at the UC system, the non-tenure track faculty teach over 50 percent of the classes, and those are the ones that they're laying off and that they're firing. And they're also basically reducing the salaries of the workers and also increasing their workload. At the same time, they're refusing to negotiate with the unions.
AMY GOODMAN: What is President Yudof's strategy?
BOB SAMUELS: I think his main strategy is basically to blame the state for everything, while they try to privatize the university. And a very telling moment came. After the UC's budget was cut by the state, the UC turned around and lent $200 million to the state. And people said, how can you lend $200 million to the state while you're giving faculty furloughs and while you're raising student fees and while you're cutting classes? And he said, "When we lend money to the state, we make a profit from interest. But when we spend money just on teachers' salaries, that money just disappears." So, from his perspective, instruction is a losing proposition, and the university should just try to get out of the business of basically teaching students and hiring faculty.
AMY GOODMAN: You've talked about a great deal of money being lost.
BOB SAMUELS: Right. Well, that money, the $23 billion, is mostly in the pension fund and its endowment and its short-term investments. And so, that's really a long-term problem. And the UC still has a $20 billion budget. It had more money brought into the system last year than any year before. It doesn't have to raise student fees. It doesn't have to fire faculty. It doesn't have to cut courses. They're talking about eliminating minors and majors. They're talking about moving classes online. They're doing these drastic things. And what we're seeing is just basically undergraduate students are subsidizing research, they're subsidizing administrators, they're subsidizing things that have nothing to do with undergraduate instruction.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, the implications of what's happening here in California for the rest of the country?
BOB SAMUELS: Well, basically, what we're seeing, especially at the major prestigious universities, is more and more-only upper middle class, upper class students can go to them. And they're privatizing these institutions. And the institutions-what happened about 1980 was that states started to cut their funding of higher education, and so universities looked for other ways of making money, and so they concentrated on raising funds and doing research, and especially research funded by corporations and the federal government. And so, basically now at a lot of universities, instruction only represents about ten percent of the budget, and so it's a minor aspect of the universities.
And most people don't know that, that universities, in some ways, are just kind of fronts for investment banks and investments, because at the University of California, the regents, who are the main financial overseers of the university, are appointed by the governor for twelve-year terms. And most of the regents now are Republicans, who not only have voted against taxes and have not only tried to defund higher education-and they're the ones in charge in many ways-but they're also business people chosen by Republican governors. And those-and they are real estate people, they're investment bankers. The new head of the-the chair of the UC Regents is the former head of Wachovia, and he actually-they sold subprime student loans, right? And they profit from the student loans. And also, they pushed the UC into investing heavily into mortgage-backed securities and into real estate right when those were tanking.
And so, I really think that the Board of Regents basically is forcing the UC or motivating the UC to make a lot of incredibly bad investments, and when the investments turn bad, then they try to take it out on the students, on the faculty and the workers.

Free or nearly-free public higher education was one of the cornerstones of the New Deal Party System era. It set the benchmark that in turn also kept private higher education within reach for millions of Americans whose families could not have afforded it otherwise. During the post-New Deal era, this pattern has been reversed, with higher education reverting more and more to a position of privilege and gatekeeping, with high expenses that make it increasingly difficult for even the most well-meaning to put their educations to use for purposes directed at giving back to their communities.

This is another step in that long-term process which has been under way for at least three decades now, taken in classic "Shock Doctrine" fashion, without an open democratic process, despite the fact that a Democratic trifecta is in charge in Washington, DC, and despite the fact that Democrats control both branches of the state legislature in California. I'm not saying that Democrats could totally control the process. Anti-majoritarian provisions in the US Senate and the California constitutions stand in the way of that. But they could surely make this process a good deal more public, a good deal more transparent, and a good deal more difficult for the special interests to pull off---it that were their intention.

Dems reach 60, but three threaten to filibuster final bill with public option

Chris Bowers — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:03:02 GMT

Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln have now, unsurprisingly, joined Ben Nelson and given Democrats 60 votes to proceed on the health care bill. Debate and amendments will begin the week after Thanksgiving.

As part of their statements, Landrieu and Lincoln are both claiming they will filibuster a bill with the current version of the public option. Landrieu is demanding a trigger, and claims that she is working on a compromise of that sort with Senator Schumer. Lincoln did not specify a trigger as part of her demands. They join Joe Lieberman, who has been threatening to filibuster a bill with a public option for nearly a month.

It is worth noting that, several months ago, both Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln singed the HCAN statement of common purpose which states:

Our government's responsibility is to guarantee quality affordable health care for everyone in America and it must play a central role in regulating, financing, and providing health coverage by establishing:
A truly inclusive and accessible health care system in which no one is left out.
A choice of a private insurance plan, including keeping the insurance you have if you like it, or a public insurance plan without a private insurer middleman that guarantees affordable coverage.

So, these Senators are just flat-out liars. Both Lincoln and Landrieu signed a document stating that it was the "government's responsibility to guarantee... a public insurance plan," and now they both claim they will filibuster a bill with a public insurance plan.

Both of them flipped on the card-check provision of EFCA, too. They are just liars. I don't even know why we deal with lying Senators like these. I certainly don't know why we give to organizations that give them money. How can we believe anything either from these two Senators, or from organizations that are funneling them money? They consistently lie to us about the most important, progressive aspects of the Democratic agenda.

Open tech thread: what do you want to see fixed at OpenLeft?

Adam Bink — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Part of the money you've given to support OpenLeft will be used to hire on a new technical consultant who will be working for all of us to make the site better.

We have a list of things we think will help improve the site in terms of design and tech, but since you're our readers and you paid for it, we want to ask you what you like, don't like, and want to see fixed, in terms of technical work.

Spacing? Ways to improve Quick Hits? Formatting in different browsers? Anything you've got, leave it in the comments.

Finding the keys

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Most of you probably know this one: A man is wandering around under a street light looking down at the ground. Another man comes up to him, and asks, "What's going on?" The first man says, "I lost my car keys, and I'm looking for them." The second man says, "Here, let me help you. Where did you lose them?" The first man points up the up the street a bit, "Over there," he says. The second man looks at him, puzzled. "But, if you lost your keys over there, why are you looking for them here?" he asks. The First man scoffs at him," It's dark over there. Can't see a thing. The light's much better over here."

I first read this in a book of Sufi stories by Idries Shah. Supposedly, it's ancient, much, much older than cars and modern street lamps. And I believe it. It speaks to an incredibly common foible: look for the solution that's easy to see, comfortable to look for, regardless of whether it relates to the problem. I thought of that story last weekend, as Vastleft did his best to hijack a comment thread in a global warming diary to once again bash Open Left for not fanatically supporting single-payer--even though all of us feel that it's the only practicable solution in the long run. It began with this comment by selise:

"not politically feasible" and "

The real problem, of course, is that--just like with health care reform--there's way too much money being made and to be made by those who are causing the problem in the first place. So actual solutions are not really wanted--so much so that they are simply dismissed as "not politically feasible."

i love this quote and plan to use it frequently, but i'm also reminded of something you, paul, wrote in your previous post:

...civility is not the answer. Civility would be just fine, if accountability were for the wealthy and powerful and not just exclusively for the rest of us, along with more than our fair share of blame.
Rather than civilly adjusting our public expenditures to the private penury of the post-1973 world, we should be quite rudely fighting to restore--and even improve upon--the broad prosperity of the pre-1973 era. Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive." Nothing less than that deserves to be "justice." Nothing less than that deserves to be "humane." Nothing less than that should be our bottom line.

these two quotes and what i think you are saying we need to do, seem, at least to me, directly at odds with what we are actually doing here... what i'm referring to is the recent banning of people who were insufficiently civil in demandinng a fight for just and humane healthcare.

how can you write:

Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive."

and then not defend the people who were saying EXACTLY that?

To which I responded:

Short Answer
There's a big difference between disrupting your true enemies and disrupting those who would be your allies, if only you could stop demonizing them.

In this case, "those who would be your allies" refers specifically to other single-payer supporters who see that goal as something that--unfortunately--we can only achieve in stages. But the principle expressed is far broader than that.
This answer was short, but it came from a central concern I've had for a long, long time, a concern that's been manifest in my repeated discussions of hegemony, as well as my discussions of Lakoff, and framing--a concern with finding and building progressive common ground into a coherent political force. Put simply, I don't think we can win the final battle in health care reform simply by an act of will. I think we need to significantly strengthen and deeply unify the progressive movement before we'll be in a position to successfully do that. I fervently wish that we were in that position today, but we are not. And this is where our lost keys are. As I went on to say in a follow-up comment:

I'm still chewing on what I have to say. Pretty near the core, however, is my perception that the Left has deep structural/organizational problems, and that the exclusion of single-payer from serious consideration was very much a symptom of these deeper problems.
Much as I would like to wave a magic wand, and put single-payer front and center, I'd even more like to wave a magic wand and solve the underlying problems.
I know this is not an answer to you. But I hope you can take it as a sign that I'm neither indifferent nor hostile.

What I was talking about there--"deep structural/organizational problems"--goes back to the issue of effective hegemonic struggle, which I think very clearly we are still not prepared for. And that's why I went on to post the diary "It's the lack of counter-hegemonic infrastructure, stupid! Systemic Lessons From The Rightwing Defunding Attack On ACORN" featuring an excerpt of an interview I did with Nathan Henderson-James.

Progressives can and will--and even should--disagree with each other about a lot of things. We are a diverse lot, and authoritarianism goes against what it means to be a progressive. Questioning and debate come with the territory. But a practical strategic sense says that we need to find ways to limit that debate so that it doesn't tear us apart. After all, overcoming differences is a progressive value that comes with the territory as well.

Demonization is all too easy when one spends a great deal of time fighting demons. But demonizing everyone who doesn't agree with you is like looking for your car keys where the light is good. Sure it's easier that way. But it doesn't solve the problem at hand. In fact, you are doing the demon's work for them when you demonize those who fundamentally agree with you about the ends. And every frontpager I'm aware of at Open Left agrees that single-payer is the ultimate end--a fact that's been totally lost (or, more properly, buried) by those attacking us.

Let me be clear. It's certainly true that some in the progressive blogoshpere don't support single-payer as the ultimate goal. And it's quite reasonable to criticize them for failing to do so. It's also quite reasonable to criticize those who support a public option as a means to that end on the grounds that it may not get there. But it's not reasonable to criticize the latter group by ignoring their actual position and pretending that they are one and the same as the former. And it's even less reasonable to move from criticism to demonization. Such unreason is bad in itself. And it's even worse for the task that we face--for finding the keys.

The keys we are looking for are not just the keys to solving the problems we face as a society--the lack of universal healthcare, global warming, the lack of a decent standard of living for all--important as those undoubtedly are. More fundamentally, we are also looking for the keys to movement-building, so that we have the capacity to solve these and other problems, and most fundamentally of all, we are looking for the keys to creating a just society that no longer creates such problems in the first place.

A just society must have the capacity to recognize injustice, and to cast it out. An effective progressive movement must understand its enemies, and counter their hegemonic narratives, recognizing the evil therein. There are demons out there, there is no denying it. Indeed, the "bipartisan illusion" that normalizes demonic opposition has emerged as our primary impediment since the 2008 election.

But even so, to believe that demons are the explanation for every adversity we face is to think just like the rightwing movement does. There is nothing at all progressive about it. It's not just an example of looking for our car keys where the light is good, because, you see, it ends up being much, much worse. It ends up demonizing everyone who will not join us in looking for our car keys where the light is good.

It ends up demonizing anyone who gets the crazy idea of looking for the car keys where we lost them.

Darcy Burner discusses what's behind DeFazio's remarks that Geithner & Summers should go

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:00:00 GMT

On Wednesday, Chris wrote a quick hit on Representative DeFazio's statement that there was "growing consensus" among Congressional liberals that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner should step down. He went on to say that Summers should go as well. Folks in the blogosphere have been saying as much for a long time now, but this seemed like something new, coming from a veteran Representative. The piece Chris linked to ended with DeFazio saying, ""We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans," underscoring that it was not just a general criticism of Geithner and Summers, but one closely tied to the need for shifting from a Wall Street-centered economic policy to a Main Street-centered one. So I followed up by talking with Darcy Burner, Executive Director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to see what it might mean.

Open Left: On MSNBC Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that he and other liberal House members are becoming increasingly tired of the Obama administration economic policies that are too focused on maintaining the stability and health of Wall Street firms and largely ignore Main Street. There's been significant criticism of Geithner and Summers in the blogosphere since their appointments were first announced, and significant criticism of their policies as well. There's been scattered and occasional congressional criticism before, but this sounds like it's a good deal more serious. Is it? And if so, why is it different and why now? Let's take those one at a time.

Is it different?

Darcy Burner: My best guess is that it is more serious. Now the Progressive Caucus has not taken an official position. Congressman DeFazio was speaking on his own behalf, quite eloquently, I thought. I particularly liked the line about "losing two jobs to save millions." But I think that the indications are that there is growing dissatisfaction among the members of Congress who very much want to see a set of economic policies that are going to help main street, rather than just Wall Street. And a jobless recovering isn't particularly progressive approach to how we solve the economic crisis that we're in.

Now, it is the case, obviously, that we have some progressives who've been very active, particularly in the financial reform aspect, if you look at Alan Grayson, for instance. He is a member of the Progressive Caucus, he's been extraordinarily involved in asking the tough questions, and encouraging his fellow members on the Financial Services Committee to ask some really tough questions at the hearings they've held, about the Federal Reserve, about the banking system, about the banks, about some of the Wall Street shenanigans.

So there has been growing pressure from members of Congress. And, you know, we're seeing some traction around the idea of auditing the Fed, and finding out what's really going on there.

So I don't think it's particularly surprising that there would be an expression of real dissatisfaction with the Administration's economic policies and the economic advisors from progressives in Congress.
Open Left: As to why now, is there any one factor, such as unemployment hitting double digits, or do you think it's just a combination of things?

Darcy Burner: My educated guess is that it's a combination of things. Unemployment hitting double-digits is certainly a factor, the upcoming financial reform legislation, which has been watered down and watered down, and watered down again to the point where there are legitimate criticisms that it probably institutionalizes some of the worst abuses, rather than fixing them, the introduction by Congressman Conyers of a bill to restore Glass-Steagall, the ongoing discussion of the [Elizabeth] Warren Commission about what's broken in the way that this set of economic advisors has approached stabilizing the financial sector. All of those have been building and building and building, to the point that at some point we were going to hit a tipping point, and we may be just about there.

Open Left: The thing that always gets asked by insider journalists, and I hate to be like that, but to the extent it can shed some light on something people outside the Beltway always have to wonder--Is this just a trial balloon? Or can we expect more congressmembers to speak out in the next several days? Should people expect that? Or not be disappointed if that doesn't happen? What's your sense of how our audience should see it?

Darcy Burner: Well, I think it's certainly a call to take a hard look at what's going on in Congress at what progressives both inside and outside of Congress should be working on. One thing I was thinking about was that you should-I know that Congressman Grijalva made a statement at some point today, to a member of the traditional press about Congressman DeFazio's statement. I don't know exactly what was in his statement, but probably worth setting it up so that you can talk to him directly and either get a statement form hi press person to figure out what Congressman Grijalva is saying, because as one of the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it's entirely possible that he'll be driving something. [Editor's note: We're following up on this.]

Now it's worth noting that Congressman Frank is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. SO there are interesting dynamics at play.

Open Left: Is there anything you can tell us about discussions going on about the need to change direction. You've mention these things before, and how they're converging in terms of pressure, is there something more that's going on that without breaking confidences that you can tell us might be about to surface?

Darcy Burner: There has been consistent discussion among the progressive members that I talk to on a regular basis, including Congressman Grijalva of the need for progressives to be very actively engaged in the discussions about the economy, and what we do relative to the economy, both in terms of financial sector reforms and in terms of a potential upcoming jobs bill, and the set of policies around that.

To a large extent, it was we get past health care, we're going to take a breath for just a second, and 'All right now, we need to deal with the economy.'

But it has been, I think, assumed that the next big fight they would pick would be around making the economy work for most Americans rather than just multi-millionaire investment bankers.

Open Left: On the subject of a jobs bill, something else I've been working on ever singe since the Stimulus fight is the inadequate funding of the states for the shortfalls for their budgets, because it's a dollar-for-taking away from public sector spending, and that's a lot of jobs, particularly in education and health care, construction. Every time the states have to cut their budgets, fiscally it's really no different than if the federal government was cutting spending. So is that a topic that people have been discussing?

Darcy Burner: I know that it's a topic that's being discussed in DC. I've attending a number of the briefings and think-tank events that people have been talking about the various ways, different progressive approaches to fixing the economy. And certainly dealing with state and municipal spending, and trying to deal with their budget shortfalls has come up repeatedly as one of the issues that needs to be addressed. I don't know how engaged the members of Congress are in that discussion. And at the moment I think it is pretty clear that it will be one of the things that will be on the table to be discussed, in figuring out how to create jobs in actually meaningful ways to fix the economy.

Open Left: Is there anything that activists or ordinary citizens can do to contribute to changing direction on economic issues that you would recommend?

Darcy Burner: I think that there are two related but not identical efforts that are going on. One is what do you do about financial sector reform, and the second is what do you do about a jobs package and economic policies more broadly than just financial sector reform. There are opportunities to get engaged in both.

Some of the work that the Warren Commission has done in financial sector oversight and the TARP program is surprisingly readable, and I think that applying some pressure to Congress very broadly to take the recommendations of the Warren Commission seriously would be frankly really helpful.

From my personal perspective, if I were going to chose one thing that I would ask people to focus on-and this is me, speaking as me-in the next few weeks, it would be get a basic handle on that part of the recommendations to push forward, they have the potential to have a big impact.

The other thing is I think there is an opportunity to do some interesting policy work around how you create jobs, that the Progressive Congressional Caucus, and progressives in general are much more open than most of Congress to some inside-outside approaches to figuring out what the best policies are.

Were starting to have some active discussions about what might make sense, would I think be really constructive. I mean, does it make sense to approach-if there is going to be a jobs bill--does it make sense to create some WPA-like program? And if so, what does it look like, and who are the experts? And what do the numbers look like on that? Does it make sense-as you said--to focus on state and municipal spending? What are the numbers there? Who are the experts? Are there other things they should be looking at? In terms of creative ways to leverage federal dollars into jobs and economic growth in the country?

I think that now would be a really good moment for the progressive community to do some of the really creative thinking, which I think the movement is frankly pretty good at when it tries.

Open Left: Switching gears a bit, to a more negative sign that's come up, Obama was also just quoted saying that if we didn't cut spending, it could lead to a double-dip recession. There was a direct quote on this--""I think it is important though to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession." But that totally confuses short-term and long-term consequences, and in fact cutting back on spending before the recovery is accomplished is most likely to cause a double-dip recession, similar to what happened when FDR tried to balance the budget in 1937. Are congressional Democrats worried about that sort of thinking as well? Is that even on people's radar yet?

Darcy Burner: Based on the conversations that I have had, progressives understand the problem It's not the progressives issue here. Not to be cynical, but it's fascinating to me that spending doesn't count when it's war spending. But does if we're actually helping people keep their houses for certain factions of the party.

I would argue that spending on the creation of the US infrastructure, that people keep their houses so that it's stabilized the underlying security on which the financial crisis was founded... Even the cash-for-clunkers program had significant positive impact in a Main Street sort of way. But we don't blink an eye at dropping $700 billion on TARP.

Open Left: I always like to end by asking a person I interview what's the most important question I didn't ask that I should have, and what's the answer to it. It just a way that, often something pops into your head that doesn't get expressed because you're already saying something more responsive. So I always like to give a chance for someone to reflect and say something about something that they wanted to address that didn't get asked about directly.

Darcy Burner: There's something that I'd actually like to emphasize, which is that in the fight over heath care reform, we saw for maybe the first time, the outside progressive movement and progressives in Congress align around a set of ideas and principles, and move the legislation substantially to the left of where it would have been otherwise.

Nobody will claim that the House Bill was perfectly progressive or everything they want, but it is a much more progressive bill than the progressives on the Hill could have gotten without the help of the movement.

That alignment between the inside and the outside and recognizing that the whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts, in the case of the movement and Congressional progressives actively working together on policymaking, applies equally well to fights around the economy.

If we want progressive policy enacted, then the Congressional Progressive Caucus and its members are our champions, and we're the leverage that they bring to bear that gives them a real competitive advantage over the Blue Dogs and the New Dems.

Open Left: Since you brought that up, there's still this lingering fight that comes up with some people who are advocates of single payer-and I am a longtime single-payer advocate myself, though I don't take this position-but some single-payer advocates take the position that single-payer has been sold out because people were fighting for the public option, in a way that they weren't fighting for single-payer. I'd like you to speak to that.

Darcy Burner: I think we're addressing tht pretty directly. It might be worth you dairying about it separately at some point.

Open Left: I do have something written for this weekend, but I wanted to let you address it yourself, since you mentioned working together. And I do see what you were saying, that the result we have is much more progressive than seemed possible coming out of August. Things did not look headed in a very progressive direction at all at that time.

Darcy Burner: Exactly. I have several drafts of several angry diaries that I have not posted for obvious reasons. The deal is that governing and policy-making, unlike electoral politics, isn't something where you win it all or lose it all at a single moment in time. It's a [question of] where do you fall on the spectrum, more progressive, less progressive, and trying to figure out within the constraints in which you're operating, how to maximize the progressiveness of the result that you get. And it's perfectly fine to disagree on strategy, I think that having active discussions about what works, what doesn't work, what we might try next time, I think that that's really healthy and constructive.

I, on the campaign trial was pretty clearly a single-payer advocate. I'm on the record in that regard, the vast majority of the members of the Progressive Caucus are co-sponsors of HR 676, John Conyers is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You know, the issue was never that people didn't want single-payer. The issue was figuring out strategically how to effectively move the legislation in as progressive a direction as you possibly could, and the view of the caucus leadership-and it's really hard to claim, for instance, that Lynn Woolsey isn't sufficiently progressive, that's a tough sell. But the view of the caucus leadership was that they couldn't see a path to get 218 for single-payer in the short term.

That wasn't a fight that given this congress, given this environment was possible to win. And everything that they did started with the statement, 'We would strongly prefer single-payer, but given we understand that that's not what's going to happen, as a second choice we demand, at a minimum that ther be a public option.

When I was putting together briefings for them, when we brought in experts, we tried to bring in experts not only the public option, but also on single payer to have a discussion about how we make sure that the path they were pursuing left open possibilities for the future.

I think that a significant majority of the people who believe that single payer is a much better solution than the path we're on right now-and this includes myself-figured it was better to make the legislation as progressive as possible than it was to take our ball and go home. Because if progressives had taken their ball and gone home, and said our line in the sand is single-payer, we won't settle for anything less, then in order to get 218 votes for health care reform, the leadership would have actually had to go in the other direction, and to figure out how to pick up Republican votes.

Because this is not an issue of it being a little bit worse than it would have been. Had the progressive walked, had they drawn the line at single-payer and said 'We're going to walk if we don't get single-payer'. since your not going to get 218 votes for single-payer, that effectively cuts them out of the loop, and at that point it's 'How do we get the votes of however many-20 or 30 Republicans.' And think about how bad the legislation would have to be to pick up 20 or 30 Republicans in the House.

So I think it's totally fine to have a real discussion about strategy and what we can learn and what works and what didn't work, and how we can make future battles that we fight--how we can get stronger, for the next fight, as well as winning the fights that we're picking.

Those are discussions we should absolutely be having. My frustration is with the accusations of bad faith, on the part of the people who have been working incredibly hard to try to make the legislation that was moving through Congress as progressive as we possibly could.

Open Left: Okay, thank you very much for your time.

Best Joke Of The Week

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

David Letterman:

Sarah Palin says that she felt ambushed when Katie Couric asked her what newspaper she read. This coming from a woman who shoots wolves from a helicopter!

That's not a joke, it's an x-ray of the conservative soul:

Implicit double-standard view of the world? Check!
Implicit sense of entitlement? Check!
Casual violence? Check!
Casual violence towards those helpless to fight back? Check!
Bottomless sense of victimhood? Check!
Utter cluelessness? Check!
Utter cluelessness about one's utter cluelessnes? Check!

And you thought conservatives didn't have souls!

No. That's vampires. And as any fan of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer knows, vampires are capable of seeking redemption.

Remember all the above. It's the key to understanding the conservative talk show rape obsession recently documented by Media Matters: