How did Romney-Ryan DO that?

How did it come to pass that rich white men born into immense privilege are telling the rest of us we should just work a little harder, expect a little less, do a little more without? 

Where do they get off telling the rest of the country what life should be for poor white men and women, poor Blacks, Hispanics, single mothers etc.(some of whom actually had those kids that Romney-Ryan say all women who have sex should be obliged to have )? 

Oookay, I got all the "coal miner" symbolism paraded out by the righties at the GOP convention. Too bad nobody had a great uncle who was a logger up here in Oregon (whew!) or worked in the mills around here. Rather, the mills that used to be around here. I bet there would be some great family history of the Wobblies.

Speaking of which, all those descendants of miners at the GOP convention and not a word about horrendous conditions? About mines collapsing because adequate shoring took too much out of profits? About black lung disease so long hidden by the great coal companies? The United Mine Workers didn't send one kid to college? Ever seen a face macerated by a broken saw chain?

But, back to the rant. 

I don't get it. Romney-Ryan don't know and can never know what it's like at the bottom of the pile, and now they want to lower their taxes (when they already pay less of their income in taxes than their drivers, their maids, their cooks, etc.) and they want to raise our insurance deductible, they want to decimate our schools, they want to take away our retirement? While they hide their tax returns and their money in offshore accounts? While telling us we should trust them?!?!

What they really want is to destroy opportunity for the rest of us to get where they are, because we need schools, hospitals and homes we can afford. And clean water to drink. And clean air to breathe. And jobs that protect us instead of kill us. And we want our kids to have some opportunity to get what Romney-Ryan got.

Republicans are anti-business

The right wing is still pushing the message, "government is bad, people are good." Less government, lower taxes, more freedom, let free markets work.

The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.

But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.

Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.

Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?

"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.

Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.

In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.

Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.

Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.

The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."

Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.

They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.

So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.

Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.

Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.

Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."

There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.

And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Yes, the heavy lifting of health care reform had to be tackled first. Not cap and trade, not financial reform. Thank you for the vision, the effort, and the guts. Only a few of us believed.

But now, there is some business that HAS to be next. Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

We need oxygen out here. Our local employers who have not already fallen are hanging on by their fingertips. Capital needs to flow again, regardless of it's source, be it relaxed requirements, government spending at a community level, housing subsidies. As quickly as possible, and don't worry about nuance or endless debates about what is "fair."

While you and congress try to figure out how to staunch the wounds caused by the behemoth banks, our local banks are being buried by the weight of Washington's indifference. It's a crisis, even if you don't hear much about it back there where you are all employed.

This needs to be tackled NOW, for the health of our communities, our economy, and frankly, for the Democratic Party.

Drop abortion insurance.

The abortion issue in the health care debate is divisive, unnecessary and wrong. It is time to drop it and move on to getting health care for more Americans.

Including abortion as a health care entitlement in this country at this time is simply a mistake. It was always an over reaching, an example of the hubris of the left, a bit of Bush-like "we won, get over it." They thought they had the votes to ram it through. Then they didn't.

Aside from the vitriol it was bound to inflame, we can not afford to be a nanny state, taking care of every misstep any individual is likely to make. It is time the left recognized that consequences are as important in reforming the health care system as universal coverage.

That is another use of the word "choice." Enabling every individual we want to insure to avoid any consequences of choices they make is to guarantee a system we can't afford.

It would be nice to increase premiums on people who have too many Big Macs and Big Gulps as well. If they choose to skate the thin ice of obesity, heart disease and diabetes, they and not we should pay the higher price. No, I don't know how to separate life style choices from inherited traits.

But those issue are not hot button issues like abortion. On that we also have to recognize we live in a pluralistic society, and there are some things we just can't ask our neighbors to pay for.

Otherwise they won't pay for anything at all.

It's about power, stupid

The truly strange thing about the war over the "public option" is that it is probably the most market oriented facet of the whole health care reform package. The wrong guys support it, the wrong guys are opposed.

Normally, the left would simply resort to regulation: "Though shalt not charge more than..." and screw up the economics of health care more than they are screwed up.

"At a minimum, there should be very strict regulation of all insurers, on and off the exchange, to promote competition and fair prices and substantial subsidies to help low-income people buy insurance..." editorializes the New York Times, again illustrating how the left doesn't "get" economics. To promote competition you don't regulate insurers, you guard the markets, reduce "barriers to entry," etc.

There are many market forces in place that drive up the cost of health care "as a system." Doctor owned diagnostic centers, for example; lack of competition in any one geographical market; insurance oligopolies; no standardized charting.

The antidote is to introduce forces that can systemically drive down prices, and that is best achieved through competition. That competition is best enhanced with public options, consumer choice, consumer consequences, all of which are lacking in the current environment.

And maybe for that reason alone, the brains of the Republican right are so opposed. The public option might actually work, because it really is a market-based tool. A tool they should favor.

On the other hand, if they can kill the public option and force the left into its comfortable role of law-based decision making, they will be able to point out that the left does want to deny choice, favors government over the individual. It is a long term strategy to get back into power.

The administration needs to grab this process. It can not be left to the right, nor the blue dogs, nor the far left. This administration is in a unique position to take all the good ideas and rework the health care landscape, with or without "compromise." Their plan could be the compromise.

There are many good ideas out there. Public option. Co-operatives. Tort reform. Transportability. Elimination of rules that limit plans to "in-state." Standardized, transferable electronic records. Perhaps they all need to be given a chance.

It is time to get to work.

The public option

On Friday, Sarah Palin joined Republicans nationwide in opposition to public libraries.

Funded by major publishing companies, book store chains and a large seller of books over the Internet, the right wing has declared libraries to be "socialist, communist, and not the American Way."

Libraries, they say, threaten the ability of Americans to buy books, and could lead to government control over what is read, by whom and where.

"If government buys books, government will decide what books to buy. It is clear that this is a threat to democracy," said (former) prescription drug addict Rick Limberger on his radio show.

Will O'Kelly, on his television program and between ads for exotic Swedish sponges, said that people who go to libraries may be affiliated with Al Queda, he didn't know that and wasn't saying that, but librarians should be investigated, and those who publicly deny the fact should be required to prove it isn't true.

Shamus Hennesy said that it is clear that library books are a vehicle for disease, and only pristine, white pages with virginal paper unsullied by unknown hands of other possible color were good enough for his daughters. He compared libraries to crack houses and the sharing of library books to the sharing of needles.

"Tea Baggers," the unfortunately named movement of people afraid of an educated populace, have protested at town hall meetings nationwide. Funded by the book sellers, mobilized by radio entertainers, they shout into microphones provided by the government that people being able to read books purchased by government represents an infringement on their rights.

But it is the darling brunette of the far right who has captured the essence of the debate. Not that her looks matter. If she was a moose with dewlaps and dimples, she would still command attention for the power of her ideas.

"We don't want to pay taxes so other people can read," said Palin, who also said that she would definitely take up arms against public education when she might run for president in 2012, though she said she isn't saying that, nor what she was saying, but said that too with her famous coy smile.

"Government is bad. Taxes are bad. Tax supported 'public' schools are bad. 'Public' libraries are bad. Anything with the word 'public' is bad, because it has most of the same letters as pubic, and will give our young people ideas and lead them down a path of moral decay," Palin said with a wink that instantly drew millions of conservative men down that very same path.

"If I can't afford to pay for my child's education, I should not have an educated child," she added, pointing again with pride to her own family. "Besides, I don't read that much."

Others have not been so direct.

"Libraries threaten the profits of national book store chains. Without profits, they will fail, throwing thousands of sales clerks out of work at a time when the economy can ill afford additional unemployment," said Pewt Heinrichs, former Republican strategist.

Those in favor of libraries have remained for the most part silent. "We just think people should have access to books, even if they can't afford to buy them," said one quietly, asking to remain anonymous, afraid his neighbors would show up to burn down his home.

Insurance companies need competition

There have been several health care commentaries from the right with important ideas for the debate on health care. John Mackey of Whole Foods has been unfairly beat up for his ideas (read it here). There have been others.

But they often contain one important flaw. They seem to assume that if something goes wrong, it is the fault of the patient. He or she eats too much or smokes too much or drinks too much.

But not all health events are a matter of choice. Everything that happens to us is not the result of bad habits.

I appear to be healthy, I exercise, I am not overweight. I don't smoke and haven't had a drink in decades. I don't do soft drinks.

But I was refused health insurance because I have high cholesterol. Not heart disease, mind you, but high cholesterol, a condition that could cause heart disease. About the time I decided to address this issue with drugs, unsuccessful with diet, I had to change doctors because of a dispute between the insurance company and my doctor's company over how much money insurance would pay for my visits.

My new doctor ordered a battery of tests. Tests that insurance companies don't like to pay for, because they don't really affect treatment. If you have high cholesterol, the treatment is to take statins, it doesn't really matter why you have high cholesterol. They claim the doctors order the test to make more money.

But my doc wanted to know, because it might dictate how to attack my high cholesterol. It turns out I have a genetically-caused situation. I don't know how to describe it, other than remembering that I had something like three markers for the genetic issue, and if I had the fourth marker, chances are I would already be dead, or face dementia because of plaques in the brain, or worse.

The point is that I have a genetic condition, not modifiable by diet, that could affect my health. And for that reason, I was denied health insurance by private companies. I had to scramble to find a "public option" that would take me.

I am not alone. Many have conditions that allow the insurance industry to decide, after being paid many tens of thousands of dollars, as I paid them, that a patient isn't worth the risk. Heart disease. Broken bones. Family history of cancer. Diabetes. Go away.

The game is rigged in their favor. I know this as a citizen, and having watched them from a chair on the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners. The market mechanism does not work very well when talking about health care, nor insurance.

Our system is broken. We can get great care in America, and I know that, too. I have had exemplary doctors, and I am a demanding patient. But the "system of health care" is broken. There is too much paper work. Doctors face unnecessary lawsuits. Insurance codes are designed to deny payment and coverage, not make it better.

It's time for a change.

Republican lies about health care

It gets more bizarre by the day. Now the Republicans are telling ugly lies to scare people:

Seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." -- Sarah Palin, Friday, August 7th, 2009.

There is no such language anywhere in any health care proposal. Republicans are making this stuff up. It is ugly, and the minds that create this crap, especially that of the narcissistic Sarah Palin, are ugly.

We need to make health care better in America. We need to expand insurance coverage to friends and neighbors who have lost their jobs, or can't get insurance because one of their parents had diabetes. We need to create a system that will take care of our children.

It is time Republicans stopped lying about the "public option," which is just another optional insurance program like Medicare, more "private" than V.A. hospitals. It is time Republicans stopped lying about "death panels." It is time Republicans stopped denying that it is immoral to let millions of Americans go without seeing a doctor when they are sick.

We have a problem with health care in America. It is time to find a solution.

The health care onion

First, there is the debate about fixing this nation's health care. Inside that, there is the debate about the health care debate, whether it is being rigged. Inside that, there is the possibility that Republicans don't care so much about health care, but want to hand Obama a loss. Any loss.

Where to begin?

First off, the lie that we have the best health care system in the world needs to be dismissed. We do not have the best health care system in the world. Look up the statistics on your own. Infant mortality? We rank ninth in the industrial world. Efficiency? Thirty percent of our health care dollars go into the paper work war between doctors and insurers. Etc.

Add to that the power of corporate oligopolies; the drug companies, insurance companies, the physician-owned hospitals and groups of prescribing docs who own radiology centers, etc. We have a recipe for profit, not efficiency nor patient care.

It is important to realize that there is a difference in our "health care system" or lack of it, and the quality of care one might receive from an excellent doctor. That may indeed be world class.

But that is not what we are talking about.

One of the really wrong ideas in this debate is that "the market" will provide health care. It won't. Markets need a tight relationship between money spent and service received. You don' t have a rational market where the payer for service (insurance companies) is not the recipient (patient) of service. Patients want the best care available. Insureres want the lowest cost.

And yet, one of the closest ideas we have to bringing "market" dynamics to the table is being thrown away. Having a "public option" would fit quite well with market economics. If the public option is no good, it will fail. If it is good, it will help bring down costs, while still allowing people to choose.

And we already have "public options." Medicare. Medicaid. Most of the noise about the "pubic option" is based on fear that the gravy train won't stand up to real competition.

Even sending our poor to hospital emergency rooms is a form of "public option." An insanely inefficient option. It slows down "emergency" rooms. It is expensive. It shifts costs, so that those of us with insurance fund the system by paying $6 for a single aspirin. That is a "public option" of irrationality.

It is amazing that Republicans are again able to convince people to scream against their own interests. The men and women working at the gas station and the sporting goods store and driving truck, the retired, and certainly those who have been fired from jobs where they had insurance, should support health care reform. But misinformation, fear mongering and the politics of hate (look at those screaming faces) remain effective weapons.

We can't afford to spend more of our income on health care. It is breaking our finances, draining our future. We can't leave our neighbors without health care: That is immoral.

The time has come to look at alternatives.

McCain/Palin = Bush/Cheney

It is becoming a horribly weird instant replay, different and yet the same. A secretive and ambitious vice-president, the darling of conservatives, paired with an ideologue president who doesn't speak particularly well but surrounds himself with viciously protective handlers.

Yes, McCain/Palin is Bush/Cheney all over again. My god, maybe even worse. At least Cheney was calculating and crude when he needed to be. Palin seems to exhale meanness with every sweet sanctimonious breath, calling anyone who disagrees with her a "hater" and firing qualified professionals to put childhood friends on the government payroll.

No one really thinks John McCain understands the economy, or jobs, right? Even he admits he doesn't. With his seven houses bought by his rich wife, an admiral father who John followed through the Navy, the man has never had to work a day in his life. (Okay, he was a hero for five years as a POW. That doesn't qualify him for anything.)

McCain's financial advisor said we were a nation of whiners. I wonder if the collapse of three major banks last week and the government takeover of the two largest mortgage underwriters qualifies as whining?

Palin? No one really thinks she understands the economy, or world affairs, right? Less than two years from being mayor of Wissilla, she has barely been out of Alaska, a lovely and quaint corner of America. She was brought on the ticket for political reasons, to get the vote of the Christian right and white women.

That is a terrible reason to pick a vice president when the nation needs real leadership.

McCain/Palin is the another version of Bush/Cheney, the team that brought us the war in Iraq, the economic meltdown, and unemployment posing as deregulation. They even betrayed conservative values. These guys are clueless. They made this mess. Why in the world would we hire them back?

No more of that. It's time for change. Obama in '08.

Why Obama makes economic sense

For too long Republican's have shoveled a load of misunderstandings about education, energy, and health care into the public area. Most of it was put forth by their corporate owners: right wing fringe groups, oil companies and insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

They are wrong. Here's why:

While we pay taxes to fund public education, the money spent is also a national investment. Many of the greatest victories of the United States since W.W.II have resulted from education. We buried the Soviet Union because of our wealth, and our wealth came from a strong, educated productive work force. We put a man on the moon. We developed the computer industry.

From the G.I. Bill to strong state colleges to quality high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed them, good education builds a strong economy, and a strong economy builds a strong country.

The same is true of energy. The result of our addiction to oil is plain to see: Years of war in Iraq, fuel approaching $5 a gallon and soon inflation because of the cost of trucking food to our tables and shipping T-shirts from China.

Drilling for the few barrels left near our own shores does not break the addiction. We need more electricity and we need it now and it has to come from wind and solar. Instead of giving tax breaks to promising innovation, the nation is giving billions to the wealthiest corporations on the planet, the oil companies. We feed the addiction that way, when we need to break the habit.

Health care is broken in the U.S. It is soaking up too much of our income. Sending the sick to emergency rooms loads up that system, and it is a terribly expensive way to provide health care. We need to focus on keeping people healthy, not making them sicker before we let them get better.

We need change in this country not only from the last eight years. We need a change of thinking about how we invest in America. The sacrifice won’t be easy, and the payoff a generation away, but this is what we need to do for our children.