A Gilded Planet

The word out of the developed world's most dysfunctional national legislative body is that there is going to be some kind of grand compromise suckdown on the public option of the health care reform bill next week. Here is my message to every Senate Democrat except Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown and Roland Burris (!), the only three US Senators who so far are actually standing firm with progressives instead of preparing to fellate Joe Lieberman: Don't use the existence of the filibuster as an excuse to dodge responsibility for creating subpar legislation. Everyone knows the Democratic caucus has the power to get around the filibuster or end it , so don't expect progressives to cut you slack when you sell us down the river in deference to minority rule. Progressives worked hard to elect President Obama and the very large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. If we don't feel like we're being represented in Washington, we aren't going to work very hard...

I've long been concerned that Doug Elmendorf has been a less than fair referee on health care reform, but what he said about global warming makes it clear that he's a clown unfit to fill Peter Orszag's shoes: "Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate." Check out this Truthout article for a more complete description of why this claim is bogus, but you don't really need much more than an elementary understanding of the anthropogenic global warming trend to know that it spells doom for the U.S. economy as well as ever other economy on the planet. I understand that Elmendorf is trained in the narrow thinking of short term cost-benefit analyses, but as Congress' accountant he should figure out a way to accurately express the economic conclusions of climate science or he should resign.

This weekend's House vote to pass historic health care reform legislation sends President Obama's central domestic policy priority sailing towards the legislative end zone. In addition, the House passed major energy/environment legislation earlier this year, another major Obama agenda item. Both bills now await consideration on the floor of the United States Senate. As we work to push our Senators to do the right thing on both bills, it would be wise to keep the recent comments offered by Chris Hayes in mind: The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body. What was once a rarely invoked procedural mechanism has metastasized and turned into a de facto supermajority requirement for any legislation. In the 103rd Congress (1993-94) there were forty-six votes on "cloture," the motion to override a filibuster and allow something to be considered on the floor. In the last Congress, the 110th, the first one in which Republicans w...

Imagine that politics is baseball. Following from that, political junkies are baseball fans. And elections are the World Series (debates are the play-offs). But here's where the metaphor gets tricky. Baseball fans expect that they will get to watch the World Series every fall. After the mother of all elections last fall which created innumerable new political junkies, we now expect that same kind of annual fix that baseball fans have come to rightly expect. Yesterday was a special election. The political world treated it like it was this year's political World Series. But it wasn't. It had serious consequences for the state of New Jersey and the state of Virginia. It had conventional consequences for New York City. It had minor consequences for the United States House of Representatives, which is now slightly but measurably more progressive than it used to be. The election NY-23 may have affected the internal politics of the Republican Party in a serious way. And of course,...

Last Friday, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize as a call to action rather than a reward for prior accomplishments. If you haven't watched his remarks yet, you should . While he takes some measure of credit for his work towards ending the Iraq War, he appears uncomfortable when speaking about Afghanistan. This is a good thing. He realizes the dissonance of accepting a Peace Prize while conducting a war in Afghanistan that many are urging him to escalate. This call to action should inform his decisions moving forward. It's easy to prattle on about the Nobel Committee's process of selection ( Hendrik Hertzberg and Howard Zinn offer the best attempts). Holding the leader of the most powerful nation on earth accountable for the advancement of the cause of peace is much harder. But it is what we must do if we want peace.

The University of California employs thousands of people to keep the business of educating California's young people running smoothly. These people work every day to keep the ten campuses that make up the UC system clean and safe. They are also responsible for feeding students, faculty, administrators and campus visitors. These people work hard every day as employees of the best public university system in the world. And far too many of them live in poverty. 96% of UC service workers qualify for at least one form of public assistance , whether it's food stamps or public housing subsidies. Wages are so low for these workers that many cannot afford to meet their basic family needs. And so they work two or even three jobs. With wages for middle and low-income workers falling in the past decade (otherwise known as the Bush Years) even as the price of energy, housing, education and health care continued to rise, even with two (or three) jobs, it's very tough to make ends meet. M...

I'm working on a longer post about the current status of the U.S. economy, but I want to quickly note that Ryan Lizza's article for the New Yorker, though impeccably written, is really quite lacking as far as good piece of reporting goes. As a puff piece designed to burnish the reputation of Larry Summers, it gets four stars. But I expect a lot more from the New Yorker than that. For more on the problems with Lizza's profile, check out what Dean Baker and Matt Yglesias have to say. Paul Krugman has an interesting take as well. I do want to try to clear up some fuzzy thinking about economic policy that appeared in New Yorker and that Nikhil Dixit over at the Cal Dems blog seemed to commend in his post: Yes, unemployment is rising, but that doesn’t mean the stimulus is a failure. It wasn’t designed to stop job loss altogether. Rather, it was designed as a backstop. Don’t ask what unemployment is now, ask what it would have been without the stimulus (FYI, most economists ...

...but we are the only state held hostage by minority rule that refuses to consider any measure to raise some revenue in order to close the budget gap and thereby prevent teachers from being laid off, health services from being cut, criminals from being released early and parks from closing (as well as myriad other problems associated with drastically cutting spending in the midst of a recession). I bring this up, of course, because last night the news from Michigan indicated that their state government was going to shut down because of a failure to come to an agreement on a budget. But within hours, state lawmakers had gotten their act together (sort of): The interim budget avoided state worker layoffs and office closures. It also delayed some tough financial decisions in a state facing a $3 billion shortfall while struggling with the nation's highest unemployment rate, a shrinking auto industry, a high home foreclosure rate and an economy that soured long before the national rece...

I know, it's hard to believe. But contrary to what you may have presumed from constantly hearing about the hijinks of Glenn Beck, Michael Steele and Michelle "I only stopped ranting against the US Census after a census worker was murdered for doing his job in Kentucky" Bachmann, there are still serious conservatives out there making smart, intellectually honest arguments. They've just been completely marginalized. But Tyler Cowen describes one of the most disturbing trends in our polity as skillfully as any progressive: FOR years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth...Lately the surviving major banks have reported brisk profits, yet in large part this reflects astute politicking and lobbying rather than commercial skill. Much of the competition was cleaned out by bank failures and consolidation, so giants like Goldman Sachs and JPMo...

Antiwar activists, foreign policy realists and fans of Woodrow Wilson's principle of national self-determination should celebrate as the New York Times reports that many within both the Obama Administration and the military are skeptical of General Stanley McChrystal's plan to escalate the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan with a massive new commitment of additional troops and resources. It seems that the president is considering other options for moving forward in Afghanistan, including focusing a smaller number of troops on fighting terrorists rather than a directing larger number of troops to undertake a long-term project of nation-building with a necessarily imperialistic character. I am ecstatic at this news. It shows that the White House is realistic about its approach to the Middle East but more importantly it demonstrates that there are people in the Obama Administration who are seriously opposed to an indefinite occupation of the Middle East on the basis of muddily de...

Imagine your ideal health insurance plan. First of all, it’s there when you need it; so when you get sick, you get care. It can’t be cancelled because of a loophole. It allows you to make your own health care decisions with consultation from your doctor and no interference from insurance company bureaucrats. It won’t discriminate against you because of gender or a preexisting condition. It’s affordable, which means no exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays. There’s also no arbitrary cap on how much care you can get over your lifetime or in any given year. It doesn’t disappear if you lose your job and it doesn’t change if you change jobs. And it fully covers all check-ups and tests that helps you avoid getting sick in the fist place. The Medicare-like public insurance plan included in the bill that has passed four out of five congressional committees and the health care agenda that President Obama campaigned on last fall fits the ideal health insurance plan I describe...

Aside from the indispensable Ezra Klein , I don’t usually read the Washington Post because it seems to have adopted a policy of deliberately misleading its readers on its editorial page while its news section…well, the less said , the better . But the other day as I was walking into Moffitt Library, a WaPo headline caught my eye and I had to stop to see if I was hallucinating. The headline read “World's Wealthy Pay a Price In Crisis.” I blinked and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. The richest people in America were richer in 2007 than at any time since the 1920s. Similar statistics showed the same story around the world. Many economists and policy analysts further believed that the rich were the only people seeing real income gains from growth across the entire economy for many years before the recession. Since the recession began, I understand that the rich became slightly poorer than before. Instead of being unimaginably wealthy, they are now only obscenely wealthy. But...

William Safire died today . Many have memorialized him as an oracle of language and a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist, but I will always remember him as the man who wrote speeches for a president who committed war crimes against millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia while simultaneously abusing executive power to harass and terrorize his political enemies at home. Some may argue that it would be more polite to ignore his ignoble past serving the worst president in US history in order to eulogize him for his more positive contributions. But that would mean sweeping aside his more recent work spreading lies and disseminating distortions for another terrible president in order to promote yet another needless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I would always prefer to be charitable towards the recently deceased, but this is a man who did not seem to feel much remorse for his role in manipulating language in service of an ideology of deception and destruc...

Earlier this year, President Obama asked Congress to send him legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. Democratic leaders in Congress have been quick to respond. The House of Representatives has already passed a major climate and energy bill that will transform our energy economy. The US Senate is taking the proposal up as you read this. But even as the wheels of progress have begun to move the country forward, a growing chorus on the right have begun to challenge the president’s ambitious agenda as bad for American business and therefore bad for the American consumer. Setting legal limits on the allowable amounts of climate change pollution seems to attract controversy despite its firm grounding in the longstanding tradition of using regulation to preserve public goods. The public has long supported – by large margins – regulating the dangerous byproducts produced by the burning of fossil fuels in ord...

President Obama has set a clear goal of comprehensive health care reform before the end of this year. He has boldly determined that deferring urgent changes to the American health care system cannot wait another year. But in accomplishing this goal, Congress has a responsibility to make sure health care reform serves the public interest and not the narrow goals of Washington lobbyists. In the growing debate over President Obama's health care plan, insurance companies have made very clear their opposition to the provision of the option of an afforable public health insurance plan to every American. This opposition is based entirely on the insurance industry's fear that a viable public insurance option will cut into the potential future profits of the industry. From the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama has argued that every American has right to an affordable health insurance plan that will be there when it's needed. The not-for-profit, Medicare-like ...