Politics: National

As the Republicans prepare for their national convention, a tropical storm with the ironic name of Isaac might visit a biblical comeuppance on the party of theocracy. Now wouldn't that be "spaycial," as they say in the South. Wouldn't that be in-ter-est-ing. The Grand Old Party couldn't have picked a more appropriate place to gather, Tampa, a "city" that makes Phoenix look like Paris by comparison, a poster child for Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere, and a deep-red suburban bastion of ignorant and retrograde Republicanism. Back in the day, a convention would have defeated wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney on the first ballot, and then the old hands would have gathered in a smoke-filled room to choose a better candidate.

Tom Friedman opines that "America today desperately needs a serious, thoughtful, credible
21st-century 'conservative' opposition to President Obama, and we don’t
have that, even though the voices are out there." Deconstructing Friedman is always a fun party game, but let me be brief. The sentence presumes that Mr. Obama is a liberal. And this is based on, what? Even Obamacare is a massive giveaway to big business, specifically the insurance companies and for-profit health oligarchy. The banksters got away with it. Wars go on. The national security state is bigger. Civil liberties more at risk. Tell me something liberal in the president's record. He's about as liberal as Jerry Ford. And the "voices are out there." Really? Tom Coburn? The world ain't the only thing that's flat.

The compelling question looms larger than Friedman's clueless search for the mythical center: Why is this election even close?

When did we become a nation of deranged accountants? These United States face many critical tests, from the perilous (climate change) and exceptional (the lesser depression and the destruction of the rule of law by the plutocrats) to the merely important (rising inequality and declining opportunity). But look around and listen. What is the Most Important Issue? Federal fiscal policy. The federal debt! The federal deficit! Oh, Jerusalem!

Americans who would otherwise have difficulty balancing their checkbooks live in terror of this menace. The Very Serious People (hat-tip to Paul Krugman) in government and media have made it the true north to which every other national need must bend. It has been a gift to demagogues on the right. But your neighbor and granny are lying awake over what is actually a bunch of macroeconomic hypotheticals they do not even understand. But, but, we're deeply in debt, facing bankruptcy — look at Greece! — families have to tighten their belts, so the government should, too, and if this isn't fixed now, we'll, we'll.. (head explodes). I suppose the consequences are of the operatic kind of payback facing a high-school kid who takes just one toke of pot in the 1936 classic Reefer Madness.

It would be laughable if the damage looming from attempts to "fix" or exploit the fiscal situation was not so real.

America can accomplish a great deal when the most reactionary states pick up their marbles and leave Washington. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Pacific Railroad Act, which authorized government bonds and land grants to build the transcontinental railroad. The legislation had languished until the Southern states seceded. Then it sailed through the Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by President Lincoln on July 1, 1862. Other major pieces of the new party's agenda that never would have passed the filibuster of Southern Democratic senators also became law: Land-grant colleges and the Homestead Act. All three would prove decisive in the nation's development.

It's also worth noting that in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which broke the back of de jure segregation, 80 percent of Republicans voted for the legislation, a higher percentage than among Democrats. The Democratic majority included a solid segregationist Southern bloc, including most powerful committee chairmen and the wily Sen. Richard Russell. As Robert Caro majestically narrates in The Passage of Power, Lyndon Johnson knew how to "get" people — and as the new president, he got essential GOP support by relentlessly reminding foot-dragging Republican lawmakers that they were "the Party of Lincoln."

In the same year, Barry Goldwater won his party's presidential nomination. His opposition to federal civil-rights legislation ensured support in the South (before his assassination, President Kennedy's polling was showing him losing the South in a Kennedy-Goldwater matchup). But, still, there were Nelson Rockefeller, Kenneth Keating, Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott and George Romney, liberal Republicans all. Richard Nixon funded the Great Society, established the Environmental Protection Agency and proposed far-reaching improvement to health-care coverage. Ronald Reagan, demigod of today's Republicans, was more often pragmatic than ideological in his governing. And we don't even have to get into Poppy Bush.

This is the most important presidential and congressional election in my lifetime. The trouble is, none of the major candidates is talking about the big issues. Or is it just me? President Obama and wealthy Republican challenger Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney are outdoing each other to please the Israel lobby. There's a fierce debate over alleged ill-treatment of the super-wealthy. Romney promises to increase defense spending; Obama cut it a little, maybe. What will get the economy going again: tax cuts and other Bush redux policies, or, as Obama seems to be saying, merely not electing the other guy. The gaffe watch is on high, of course. Are these the big issues upon which the fate of the republic hangs? The political press complains that it's a boring election. No wonder. The real issues, the serious matters screaming for intelligent responses, are kept hidden away:

1. Climate change. Despite a consensus among the scientists that actually specialize in this field that climate change is real, human caused, getting worse faster than anticipated and will produce far greater cost and harm than good, we're doing next to nothing about it. Try to write about it, as I did last Sunday in the Seattle Times, and you'll be marked on reactionary Web sites to be deluged with emails, all with the same wording and alleged research that climate change is a hoax, or at best unproven. The goal is to intimidate and confuse. I don't give a damn. I'll write about it every chance I get. But our leaders won't tell us the truth, won't campaign on policies that would address it and at least prevent the worse outcome. No issue is more important.

2. The (real) economy. Mass unemployment, stagnant wages, historic inequality, slow or no growth, the end of meritocracy. These things should be unthinkable in America, but neither candidate and few members of Congress will really lay out the policies to address them. The Romney solution, tax cuts and more deregulation, is a big reason why we're in this mess. We need a major stimulus focused entirely on creating jobs, especially by building large-scale 21st century infrastructure (not "roads and bridges"). And with interest rates and Treasury yields so low, there's never been a better time to borrow. Then we need to raise taxes, go after tax shelters and tax gambling in the capital markets that doesn't create productive enterprises and good jobs. Forget beating up China over currency manipulation; we need to play China's game in trade.

I produced a Seattle Times blog post on the "You didn't build that" manufactured controversy. The comments are as instructive as anything I wrote. We're going to see a summer and fall of silliness before the elections. But beneath many of the trivialities are profound truths — such as the refusal of wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney to release his tax returns, as his father did when he ran for presidency. And this seeming kerfuffle.

The Republicans and "independents" (who really lean Republican) are embracing a philosophy that can only be described as nihilism. As I pointed out in my post, only in a nation that became wealthy and safe thanks to the delicate balance between government and the private sector could we even have the luxury of this discussion.

It's easy to think that, once in power, the Republicans will continue their own brand of big government: Heavy subsidies for arms merchants and polluters and all members of the oligarchy that have gained control of our politics. The government will grow just as it did under Reagan and both Bushes.

Surely I'm not the only one who feels as if we're in a spooky interlude, an intermission between bad and, perhaps not worse, but much of the same bad for a very long time. Or, something… A zone of circumstance lying somewhere between an asteroid strike and the widespread sense of peace and prosperity, however misplaced, of the 1990s.

Consider that wealthy Republican Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney stands a very good chance of becoming president. Despite all the damage that should have been done by the ongoing revelations of his destructive work at Bain Capital, duplicity about his tenure at same, and refusal to release his tax returns — a potential chief executive with accounts in the Caymans and a Swiss bank account — despite all this, he barely trails in the popular vote and cannot be counted out in the Electoral College. How can this be? Is it simply because Obama has lost so much of the white vote? That the right has so rewritten the narrative of the past 12 years that millions don't actually know what the hell happened?

If you thought they were The Party That Wrecked America the first time around, just wait for the first Citizens United presidential election.

By now you know the news that Americans' wealth dropped nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. This is nearly all a function of the housing collapse, combined with the fact that the wages of average people have been stagnant or dropping for 30 years. And the data, being median wealth, probably understate the real damage. For all this, there's a very good chance that 50.1 percent of the voters will return the Party That Wrecked America to the White House, the last check on a federal government taken over by the extreme right. So if most of us are poorer now, just wait.

We're lectured that too many people have been living beyond their means, leeching off the public dole, racking up unsustainable debt. This is never you and me, mind you. It's someone else, but there are a lot of them and something drastic has got to give. David Brooks is one of the chief public scolds who also laments a loss of morality and dignity, even if he has spent his career supporting the jungle capitalism that has brought us low. Another is Thomas Friedman, prophet of world flatness. The government has spent decades giving and now it's going to have to spend the future taking back (but never from his pet projects, of course).

With Rep. Paul Ryan, lionized for his seriousness, we have federal budgets that put this wish into legislation. Never mind that they don't fix the deficit or debt, they do cut programs to the poor and lower middle-class. Social Security? Privatize it. Medicare? Give people vouchers worth a couple of thousand dollars (good for a low-end trip to the emergency room, if that). Military spending is "off the table," as are subsidies to big GOP donors such as the fossil fuels industry. So I hope you get a sense of this future barring a major course correction.

We're at a very dangerous moment. The May unemployment report showed only 69,000 jobs created, all part-time, and only half of what's needed just to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force. The eurozone is headed for collapse and much of Europe is in recession. China, expected to lead world recovery, is slowing, as is India. We may never have escaped the Great Recession, but if we did we're on the edge of another downturn. Put another way: The Great Depression went on for more than a decade and had recessions embedded in it, like tornadoes in a hurricane.

Faced with this, the institutions and practices that were built up carefully to mitigate just such an event are either gone — Glass-Steagall — or in a free-fall of legitimacy. The European Union. A peaceful, strong Germany. A global system of free trade. An economy where the pursuit of profit, monopoly and plutocracy is offset by checks and balances that serve the common good. The paralyzed and compromised Federal Reserve. The "fixed" and hamstrung-by-extremists Congress. And, I am sorry to rub salt in your hopes, President Obama. Economic conditions are not as bad as they were in the Depression. Yet. Leadership is worse, at least among American politicians. Hardly any will even tell us the truth about our actual circumstances.

History offers a valuable "fund," as George F. Kennan put it, upon which we can draw to understand our present circumstances and perhaps plot prudent responses.

The origin of Memorial Day was the commemoration of Union deaths after the Civil War, a conflict that cost between 618,000 and 700,000 lives in a nation with a population of less than 32 million. The South had its Confederate Memorial Day, still marked in some states of the old CSA. As this warrior republic, crusader nation has racked up more wars, Memorial Day has added these deaths to the holiday.

Newspapers will again run photos of small flags planted in front of the tooth-like marble gravestones of the war dead. But if ever there was an argument for a "sunset provision" to holidays, Memorial Day is it. Even the deaths of ordinary civilians are observed. Commercialized, trivialized and a venue for cheap patriotism, Memorial Day has been drained of its somber meaning. For most Americans, it is just another day off, another long weekend, the start of summer.

The disconnect is worse than ever. We've been through a decade of war and everybody "supports the troops." But our wars are fought by a professional military whose values are, in both good and dangerous ways, cut off from the mainstream of the country. The ideal of the citizen soldier is gone. This way went Rome.

We miss the core issue: liberalism itself isn't strong enough to force them to our side and interests. Where are our armies? Where? We're in the fight of our lives with a well-meaning if irresolute leader in Obama… But he is, for better or worse, the only leader we have. — Soleri

What is this election about? Government that is not broken but "fixed" by moneyed interests to their benefit and the destruction of the public good? Shocking income inequality with average Americans left ever further behind? The American promise of a good job and economic mobility for those who, in Bill Clinton's words, "work hard and play by the rules"? Arresting the continuous expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex and stopping America's endless wars, and with them the huge opportunity costs to the nation?

It is about all those things and much more. At its core, this election actually is about what kind of nation we will be. This is often a phrase tossed out by candidates between whom, as George Wallace would say, "there's not a dime's worth of difference." Or used in times of relative peace and prosperity when the stakes are less. Not this time. So, no, we didn't pick this fight, especially not baby boomers of a certain age who can remember another America, flawed and troubled but on the right path. But we're in it. We're in the fight of our lives.

I was tied up Thursday with my Sunday column for the Seattle Times. It was a good thing; otherwise, my head might have exploded. All the oxygen in the mediasphere was taken up by a "Democratic strategist" named Hilary Rosen, who said of Ann Romney on CNN, "Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why do we worry about their future?" Vast condemnation ensued, ending with Rosen apologising. This wasn't just taking up space on Twitter or new-media sites, but the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others. A blogger for The Nation argued why Rosen was correct. I can't even imagine the wall-to-wall coverage on the boob tube.

As Evan McMorris-Santaro blogged at Talking Points Memo, "Welcome to the next seven months."

So if it wasn't already obvious, there are certain things that won't be discussed in Campaign 2012. The perhaps-failed launch of a proto-ICBM by nuclear-armed North Korea got short shrift Thursday. It may eventually be used as a cudgel against President Obama, but not today. Look over there — it's Hilary Rosen! Iran is pursuing both nuclear arms and long-range delivery systems, or not. Will we dig deep on this issue in the public square, including how Israel is driving American foreign policy not to our best interests? Don't count on it.

"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." — Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina

You didn't think the best Supreme Court that money can buy was going to let Obamacare go into law, did you? From the questions asked of lawyers and the dismal performance of President Hoover's Solicitor General, it doesn't seem likely. Now the question is not merely whether the court will strike down the individual mandate but also use this as a springboard to go after more, beginning with Medicaid. Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas have waited their careers for this moment. Anthony Kennedy is a Reagan appointee. The Federalist Society and the entire right-wing infrastructure have built themselves for it. Now we will get another lesson in why it has been a calamity to have 30 years of mostly Republican presidents packing the federal judiciary. Activist judges? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The so-called Affordable Care Act has been a trainwreck from the beginning. Mr. Obama didn't make it a centerpiece of his campaign, so he had no mandate to do it. Most Americans don't understand it. Like the Dodd-Frank financial "re-regulation" legislation, it is compromised to appease the plutocrats, in this case the insurance industry. About the only clear benefit I can parse is the prohibition against denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Worse, he wasted a precious year on "health care reform" that should have been spent in very obvious and effective measures to save an economy in free fall (and loudly claim credit). To address the worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression and reset the economy for a prosperous, sustainable future. "Never let a crisis go to waste," my ass. Instead, Mr. Obama chose health care. Here his constant template was revealed, alternately passive and ineffective, helped along by a spineless Democratic majority in Congress. The result: The triumph of the Tea Party in the 2010 election shellacking. He would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer? Were he not running against Willard Romney, he would be consigned to the Jimmy Carter dustbin — and he might yet be, for the Republican, whose health-care program in Massachusetts became Obamacare, has unlimited money.

There are many possible explanations for why Americans pay so much more. It could be that we’re sicker. Or that we go to the doctor more frequently. But health researchers have largely discarded these theories. As Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan put it in the title of their influential 2003 study on international health-care costs, "it’s the prices, stupid." As it’s difficult to get good data on prices, that paper blamed prices largely by eliminating the other possible culprits. They authors considered, for instance, the idea that Americans were simply using more health-care services, but on close inspection, found that Americans don’t see the doctor more often or stay longer in the hospital than residents of other countries. Quite the opposite, actually. We spend less time in the hospital than Germans and see the doctor less often than the Canadians. "The United States spends more on health care than any of the other OECD countries spend, without providing more services than the other countries do," they concluded. "This suggests that the difference in spending is mostly attributable to higher prices of goods and services." On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-an-mri-costs-1080-in-america-and-280-in-france/2011/08/25/gIQAVHztoR_blog.html?tid=pm_pop