Hoyer Now Supports Public Option: "With or Without Republicans"

Brett Zongker at the AP (I know, the "Against Progressives" AP!), has an article today featured by Huffington Post stating that at a town hall (can we retire that silly term already people...) that he now supports the Public Option, "with or without Republican support." This is progress we can believe in... for now. To wit:

"If the question is do I plan to vote for a public option with or without Republican support, the answer is yes," Hoyer said.

A public option would lower insurance premiums for everyone through competition with private insurers, he said. The House, he said, would not pass an alternative calling for nonprofit cooperatives, which has been floated in the Senate.

And then, in a "tell" or a "wink" at his enlightened readers, Zongker goes on to -- gasp, almost "report" -- by including a short episode reflective of the deep insights and awareness that these persistent town-hallers (tea-baggers/deathers/birthers/seceders) bring to the table. HILARIOUS. Like someone on Medicare decrying gov'mnt run health care, this time it's her state that has it covered, so why do we need the government? Sheesh. We are not even having the same conversation in this country. Not even in the same room:

The first questioner who challenged Hoyer directly, April Burke of Mechanicsville, Md., said her son and daughter in law both had lost their jobs and health insurance but were covered by the state.

"So why should I want to have the government get into my business?" she asked Hoyer.

The congressman said Burke's family would benefit from the health care overhaul being proposed. But she shouted back: "We want government out of our business now."

I presume this means she wants everyone to pay out of pocket for their children to go to private-run schools (why should single people subsidize parents who made an individual choice to have children)? Right lady? And we should all pay out of pocket for private protection services - let them compete - and get rid of municipal police and fire departments, right lady? Surely the private sector can be more efficient and provide better teachers, fire fighters, ambulances, police. Oh, and while we're "getting government out of our business," we should get rid of the Defense Department, right lady? Just replace it with Blackwater and Halliburton, right lady? Then it will all go better and cheaper. Hell we already had as many contractors (mercenaries, ahem...) in Iraq as we had patriotic enlisted troops, so we're almost there.

Oh, and no more NASA, no more spy satellites, and no more satellite TV or GPS. No more control over epidemics -- no more annual flu shots, right lady? It's all government in our business.

And why not have 3 of the same road everywhere you go - we should make road builders compete and only the people who drive on them should pay tolls for those roads. That won't hurt quality much, will it?

A Libertarian - er, Anarchist - paradise.

Because that's what these people really are: anarchists. You want government out of our business? It means there's no government. That's anarchy. That's destruction of the nation. Lady, meet the secessionist klan. You want your country back? No lady you want your country gone.

As The Right Implodes - Setting Free The Left

I am so embarrassed by these numbskull right-wing “secessionist” mouth-breathers. Why don’t they just burn the American flag already? I keep an American flag over my driveway (try to keep it in from the rain too, which I don’t see my Republican neighbors doing). It does help my pride stay strong. Republicans have been wrapping the flag around their christian crosses for so many decades it almost feels like right-wingers own the flag. Ridiculous. Like they’re assumed (this canard may be dead after the Iraq debacle) to be “strong on defense.” Please. More like, strong on defense *contractors*.

In fact I’m growing weary of the Afghanistan war. Again, where are the clear objectives? What does victory mean? We need to end that war I think and let the FBI and intelligence services take over the fight against terrorism. Why do we need to occupy entire nations to fight terrorism? It's absurd on its face. Afghanistan and Iraq are hardly the only two failed states in the world. So NOT occupying failed states is a long-standing pillar of United States foreign policy (espoused).

With a government being run by professionals, I don’t think we’ll have the bizarre confluence of events and string of failures that allowed those 4 planes to be hijacked simultaneously, fly freely through the most protected air space in the world, and crash freely an hour later into three of the most American iconic structures known around the world - two weeks after National Security Anti-Terrorist Richard Clarke in The White House AND the head of the CIA go personally to a month-long vacationing Bush in Crawford and personally warn him “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and that chatter was to all-time high levels. And what did Dick “we’ve kept them safe for 8 years” Cheeeeney do about that? Nothing. Nothing. What does Bush do about that? Nothing. Nothing.

When Cheney says “8 years safe” - notice he’s starting after when he let the worst domestic attack since Pearl Harbor happen without a glitch after almost a year in office, after having been Chief of Staff to Ford, after having been Secretary of Defense to George H.W. Bush, after having been Vice President and acting President for a year beforehand - and he has to include the same year since Obama has been elected and effectively in charge - he has to take credit for Obama’s time in office too in order to get his 8 years.

These people are ruthless. And make no mistake - it’s about class, money, and privilege. Witness Sunday's fawning Chris Wallace interview of Cheney, what Andrew Sullivan called, “like a teenager interviewing the Jonas Brothers” - which was widely repeated by other commentators. They wore coordinated clothes I saw, light khakis (the same) and a navy blazer, both of them. Like, so preppy. Like two high school girls calling each other and coordinating their clothes. Fox is a joke. What’s been painful to me is that I saw they were a joke in 1999. It’s been 10 years that I’ve known what they’re doing -- it took the ascent of blogs to empower the non-crazies and to finally start documenting the atrocities in an alternate media.

Until the alternate medium of the blogs, which earnestly began only in 2003, this is how the oligarchs (the true ones, not Glen Beck’s crazy rants) ruled and manipulated.

The rightwing tea-bagging protesters -- "the angry right -- are hilarious. Being angry in loyal opposition is what liberals have been doing for 40 years, though let me clarify I don’t consider myself a political liberal. It’s just with the political spectrum so skewed right, any reasonable person these days could be “liberal” by comparison to what’s been passing as “centrism” ever rightward since Nixon (who by the way made a universal coverage bill offer to a young Ted Kennedy who declined it then and spent the rest of his life regretting it - Nixon, for universal coverage).

I guess that makes me as much a Nixonian as a so-called liberal. I agree with Ron Paul on gutting the defense contractors budget (it won’t compromise security) and legalizing prostitution and marijuana (duh…). Does that make me a Libertarian? I want a strong federal education agency and not leave unequal education to the provincial whims of states and local politics. Does that make me a liberal? I am to the right of Scalia on the 2nd Amendment. Does that make me an arch-conservative? I think there should be a constitutional amendment forcing congress to balance the budget in reasonable periods of time so we don’t have structural deficits for decades like we have -- does that make me a much-vaunted “fiscal conservative”? I strongly know that corporations and their “paid speech” are not “persons” as the supreme court ruled over a hundred years ago, with all the same rights as you and me, human breathing beings. Does that make me a populist?

To all these things, the answer to no. I am none of these things except those that I am in only parts.

This isn’t a battle with two sides.

The Surging Populist Rage

In this morning's New York Times, the invaluable social critic Frank Rich writes about a familiar theme on this blog, namely the catastrophic policies set forth by both parties in the 1999 repeal of the depression era reform bill "The Glass Steagall Act" and the even more disastrous foundation for our current crisis, "The Commodities Futures and Modernization Act of 2000." From Rich:

Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.

Truly any American should be concerned that the usual suspects of the 1990's whose policies caused so much international turmoil at the time, and whose policies (along with Chairman Alan Greenspan) set the stage for the gathering storm of the past eight years that culminated in this crisis of our own making we face today. Chillingly, Rich suggests that these players may not be fully rehabilitated.

A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman chosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican.

My greatest concern is about "the arrogant" Larry Summers. And while I have to honor a confidentiality oath, I can say that Summers is one of the creepiest people I have ever met and listened to in person, when he was President of Harvard University. One gets the sense that this man's sense of self-supremacy is unlimited and untempered even by recent years' evidence of his past failures. He is brilliant, the youngest professor ever to be tenured at Harvard University, practically at the moment he received his PhD. But academic brilliance does not translate into policy brilliance, which is fraught with unintended consequences if implemented poorly. This man rose too far too fast and was handed policy reigns when he should have been relegated to an advisory position and nothing more.

In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. A year later, he was, with Alan Greenspan and Rubin, a leading advocate of the derivatives deregulation. Also during his stint in the Clinton administration, Summers was successful in pushing for capital gains tax cuts.

Larry Summers also deserves credit for advocating Washington Consensus policies during the Asian Financial Crisis. He eschewed Keynesian policies in favor of fiscal austerity, forcing the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, policies criticized by liberal economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.[2] According to the book The Chastening, by Paul Blustein, during this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia. On May 4, 1998, when the Indonesian government began to raise fuel prices as part of an IMF program in exchange for hard currency, students started to protest, and in the ensuing riots, hundreds burned to death as blazes swept shopping centers in Jakarta.[2]

During the California energy crisis of 2000, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with Alan Greenspan and Enron executive Kenneth Lay to lecture California Governor Gray Davis on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation.[4] Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets. [5] It was later conclusively revealed that Enron traders were the cause of the California electricity crisis.

Here's a taste of the 1990's shenanigans by Summers and his ilk, and now ask yourself whether you want these "thinkers" in charge of turning around the American economic crisis we face.

Many critics of trade liberalization... see the Washington Consensus as a way to open the labor market of underdeveloped economies to exploitation by companies from more developed economies. The prescribed reductions in tariffs and other trade barriers allow the free movement of goods across borders according to market forces, but labor is not permitted to move freely due to the requirements of a visa or a work permit. This creates an economic climate where goods are manufactured using cheap labor in underdeveloped economies and then exported to rich First World economies for sale at what the critics argue are huge markups, with the balance of the markup said to accrue to large Multinational corporations. The criticism is that workers in the Third World economy nevertheless remain poor, as any pay raises they may have received over what they made before trade liberalization are said to be offset by inflation, whereas workers in the First World country become unemployed, while the wealthy owners of the multinational grow even more wealthy.

[C]ritics further claim that First World countries impose what the critics describe as the consensus's neoliberal policies on economically vulnerable countries through organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and by political pressure and bribery. They argue that the Washington Consensus has not, in fact, led to any great economic boom in Latin America, but rather to severe economic crises and the accumulation of crippling external debts that render the target country beholden to the First World.

Bear in mind that all the globalization of that decade still led to unending massive trade deficits that helped mushroom the national debt more in the last eight years than in all prior American history combined. Now our foreign debt is held by Japan and China, and our economy is subject to enormous economic and political threats by our adversaries. To me, that is not good policy, Professor Summers.

I had the good fortune to hear a small-room lecture by a past-president of a small Latin American nation, a man who experienced the ravages of the IMF first-hand and was ousted from his position because of his own country's crisis. This stuff is not theory.

Further alarming is Rich's claim that Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan's predecessor whose leadership of the Fed laid the policy groundwork to save America from its last economic crisis in the late 70's to early 80's, is being "shut out" by Larry Summers today. Here's Volcker's previous work:

Paul Volcker, a Democrat[4], was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and reappointed in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan.[5]

Volcker's Fed is widely credited with ending the United States' stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Inflation, which peaked at 13.5% in 1981, was successfully lowered to 3.2% by 1983.

While our current crisis is different in nature to be sure, it is no less urgent and its eventual solutions will be no less controversial than the policies Volcker implemented in the early 80's to arrest the inflationary spiral of that time.

The New "1/20" Rule
Here's where the new "populist rage" enters, as millions of Americans find themselves very recently out of work in the last three months alone. Again from Rich:

But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

Yes, it's hard to believe, harder to fathom, that only 1% of the American population received more than 20% of the entire national income. When candidate Barack Obama said inartfully that he wanted to "spread the wealth," he wasn't talking about socialism. He was talking about this issue, about the need to rebuild the middle class, which brought this country to the peak of its economic and global power in the 20th century, so that more people can earn a better share of the nation's "pie," and so we can make it as big as we possibly can, together. That's not welfare. It's not socialism. It's how to build a healthy, diversified, and strong national democratic capitalist economy.

The strongest punch and thematic statement from Mr. Rich comes in his opening paragraphs this morning. And if the president, the senate, and the congress do not come to terms with this warning soon, it won't just be "the president's best-laid plans" that get "maimed."

SOMEDAY historians may look back at Tom Daschle’s flameout as a minor one-car (and chauffeur) accident. But that will depend on whether or not it’s followed by a multi-vehicle pileup that still could come. Even as President Obama refreshingly took responsibility for having “screwed up,” it’s not clear that he fully understands the huge forces that hit his young administration last week.

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

What If Houston NEEDED to Evacuate 4 Million?

Where the hell has all the "War on Terror" money gone in the past 4 years?

Houston traffic, in anticipation of Hurricane Rita and made all-the-more anxious by recent coverage of Hurricane Katrina -- is at a deadly stand-still. The mayor of Houston perhaps said it best this morning when he said that the highway parking lots would be "death traps" if Rita were a direct hit.

How the hell can this happen over 4 years after 9/11? With all the talk of terrorism against chemical plants or potential dirty bombers, how can emergency planners and politicians not be prepared for a mass evacuation of an entire city?

It seems that money could have been well spent on automatic traffic flow systems that would allow planners to reverse traffic flows with a virtual throw of the switch. Gates could swing entrances shut and open access to contraflow lanes. Instead, it took over 12 hours for a request to be made and then fulfilled, and even then, hapless planners and politicians worried aloud about just "shifting traffic north" unless their eventual exits and stays upstate were measured and planned.

This, after four years since 9/11.

Inexcusable at all levels. Government in the U.S. is broken. Who will fix it and when? Like Houston, the country is simply out of time.