Author: Ruth Calvo

by Lucy Nieto (flickr)

While the wingers in the Senate keep the government from functioning and accuse the administration of dysfunctional neglect, anyone who watches CSPAN coverage of Congress can see that the Right will sink to anything to hold up the proceedings. The same representatives who insist that they’re doing the people’s will are sitting on appointments to the extent that departments intended to serve those people are unable to do their jobs. Appointments are not the only blockage by the Right that takes away taxpayers’ right to a functional government.

A telling tactic appears in the pages of the Congressional Record. Standard practice for any official meeting involving rules is the approval of the record of proceedings for the previous meeting. In the U.S. Senate, right wing practice now has become requiring a taking of the yeas and nays even to approve those minutes.

On Sunday, March 21, 2010, the Senate met to enact health care reform legislation. First, they had to get over the hurdle of pure obstructionism.

Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 1, rule I, I demand a vote on agreeing to the Speaker’s approval of the Journal.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the Speaker’s approval of the Journal.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that the ayes appeared to have it.
Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.

So time was wasted in order that a member of Congress could vent his displeasure with the elected majority of the Senate.

The outright childishness of the Right has been their major feature for some time. Finding that they can use the rules of order to deny the public any effort on their behalf, they have leapt into the fray to make everything as hard as it can be in getting any business done. As the price of conducting a Congress rises daily, the obstruction is more than annoying. It is wasteful and very expensive.

These clowns need to be voted out. Their refusal to do their jobs is actionable, and their constituents should act out their own anger about wasting public funds on pure, unalloyed obstruction of this country’s government.

No by oleg.ski (flickr)

The right wing hears the people’s voice speaking up against … the public interest. You can’t make this stuff up.

Listening to speeches on the floor of Congress, it’s plain that the right wing is promising they are hearing the people. As Judd Gregg declared Thursday, around 3:15 PM, “The people have spoken”. Okay, that made me laugh out loud. Surely that’s supposed to mean that the elected representatives of the people are sure that democratic elections mean something, and they are going to enact the president’s programs? Actually, no.*

In fact, the members of the right wing who are constantly speaking about the people’s will are dedicating themselves to defeating that very thing. Although they are not elected by all the people, but just their own state, the wingers are out to impose their will, not the program of the President of all the people. The right wing is using the excuse of a popular mandate to try to defeat the health care program that most polls are showing the people would like.

When the health care bill is put before the American people, they choose a more complete program than the right is allowing, and would prefer the public option.

Conducted by Research 2000 for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and Democracy for America (DFA), the survey finds only 33 percent of likely voters favor a health care bill that does not include a public health insurance option and does not expand Medicare, but does require all Americans to get health insurance. Slightly more Democrats — 37 percent — favor the idea, while only 30 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents do.

Meanwhile, if the public option and Medicare buy-in are added, 58 percent of people support the idea. The number of Republican supporters drops to 22 percent, but independent support rises to 57 percent and Democratic support to a whopping 88 percent.

Since the right is vociferously demanding the people be served, why aren’t they working for a public option?

Perhaps we need to speak up a little louder. a poll taken more recently, in the second week of February, indicates that most people want to see a comprehensive health care reform passed.

A 63 percent majority of Americans, notably Democratic and Independent voters, want Congress to “Keep Trying” to pass a comprehensive health care reform plan, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.

The survey, conducted Thursday through Monday, queried more than 1,000 voters across the country, and also asked which party is responsible for lack of cooperation in Washington, D.C. The margin of error was 3.5 percent.

The key question: “Do you think lawmakers in Washington should keep trying to pass a comprehensive health care reform plan, or should they give up on comprehensive health care reform?

Sixty-three percent said “Keep Trying” while 34 percent opted for “Give Up.”

Does this mean that the right wing is listening to the voice of the people? That would be a first. No. As usual, the right is trying to defeat the will of people and beat back their interests.

In terms of public attitudes, the country approves of the reform proposal quite a bit more when Americans actually learn what’s in the plan, and get beyond the nonsense spread by people like McConnell.

But McConnell’s notion that polls should dictate policy outcomes is just odd. Indeed, it’s not even helpful to the Republican leader’s own cause.

The conservative Kentucky senator may not realize this, but public opinion generally runs counter to Republicans on most areas of public policy. Republicans don’t care — they have their agenda and they’re sticking to it — and aren’t about to let surveys dictate legislative outcomes.

Is it “arrogant” for GOP lawmakers to take positions that run counter to public attitudes? Americans didn’t want to see escalation in Iraq in 2007 and Republicans said, “Well, we’re going to give it to you anyway.” Americans didn’t want to see federal lawmakers intervene in the Terri Schiavo case in 2005 or spend time working on an anti-gay constitutional amendment in 2006, but Republicans said, “Well, we’re going to give it to you anyway.” Americans weren’t especially fond of the bank bailout in 2008, but that didn’t stop Mitch McConnell from voting for it, effectively telling Americans, “Well, we’re going to give it to you anyway.”

The irony of the very people who ran the country into monumental debt by their policies when they were in power now decrying every expenditure for the public good is one they are incapable of seeing or discussing. When the wingers stand up on the floor and declare that the ‘people have spoken’, they show their complete deafness. The people chose this President, not them. They are hard at work against the people’s interests, the people’s voice, and the people’s elected president.

When the U.S. people speak, their voice is being shut out by right wingers intent on working to defeat the public interest.

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* NO is the operative word when the right wing has anything to say.

Tags: 2008 elections, elections matter, health care reform, Popular causes, Republicans

photo courtesy todosnuestrosmuertos (flickr)

From working on a build with Habitat for Humanity in Chile I am sure that the little houses we put up are still standing. Most of the building we did was wood frame, and even by falling wouldn’t do a lot of damage. The area where we built, CasaBlanca, is a wine growing area and lowland, so there would not be great threat from earthquakes.

My greatest fear personally is for the Santiago archaeological museum, a priceless collection of pre-Columbian art and mementos. Sadly, the building itself is of stone, a renewal of the monumental architecture period that saw a downtown built of heavy, immense, stone structures. Circling an interior courtyard, the collections are on two stories, with large stairways, heavily built and decorated, many tiles and carved stones. Many of the earthenware remnants of the tribes that occupied the country before Europeans arrived will be easily damaged, and is not recoverable.

In Santiago, the downtown area contains multitudes of the monumental style of buildings,and even farther out the lack of space has militated many-storied buildings. Ominously, as in Port au Prince, Haiti, there are supermarkets on the bottom floor scattered everywhere. Apartment buildings abound, many of stone and concrete.

In Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, seaside towns that we visited, the hills rise up from the shore, and older buildings built of stone are interspersed with funiculars, to climb the steep hills. Houses are built one above the other, rising up the hills, around the shore. Shopping centers are formed by several stories of stores, with stairways winding up through the stores through several layers. A tsunami has hit Valparaiso, where the docks are full of ships and old stone buildings, and a seaside cafe that has particular appeal – that I hope wasn’t destroyed.

In Vina del Mar, there are many tall apartment buildings where visitors from all over the world vacation. The parks on the beach are lovely, and there is a flower clock that is a feature the town prides itself on. The shopping mall there has several stories, which include a supermarket in the bottom story.

As word continues to come in, I am terribly concerned for the Chileans who were woken up in the middle of the night to find a world tumbling around them. Soon the assistance will start coming in, to do what it can. Much that was of such great worth, though, will never be replaced.

The relief effort is one that I will be personally involved in. Please consider joining in.

Tags: Chile, earthquake, irreplaceable art, relief effort

Jinx! (flickr)

The self-described Conservatives meeting in Washington, D.C. this week seldom mention the previous president, and when they do prefer to describe him as not being true to conservatism. The reality is that the worst president ever was the ultimate conservative. His failures, which are obvious to anyone in even the vaguest contact with reality, are the failures of conservatism. Those are failures that the movement and its adherents would like to distance themselves from. The truth, however, is that by getting the power to enact their programs, their now rejected former president has proved that their ideology is a failure, and a disastrous one.

Bush put into effect the tax cuts that he had promised, as well as the deregulation that is de rigueur for the corporate welfare conservatives espouse. As Thomas Frank pointed out on Washington Journal February 16, previous administrations of conservatives such as Reagan had made a practice of this and he continued it. As Frank noted, recently Reagan advisor David Stockman has published a book in which Stockman says he realized early on that the principle of cutting taxes while increasing spending on programs like defense was unworkable. Though he and other members of Reagan’s, and subsequent, administrations claimed that it was disaster in the making – and argued against the principle of incurring debt on the grounds that it would keep only Democrats from carrying out social programs – conservatives continued on with the policy that has destroyed our economy.

That the previous administration was irresponsible not only fiscally but morally is an observable fact that the present conservatives wish to deny, but the facts are there. To keep from equating conservatism with the ideology that brought on our present disasters, they deny their connection to the ultimate conservative, George W. Bush.

Dr. Paul Krugman spoke to that myth in November of 2007, and made several connections between the then president and the conservative ideology.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud. But Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as “humiliating to the South.”

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts — which, for a time, were all too successful — to intimidate the press. But this administration’s media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh’s apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media adviser.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater — who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life — staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.

Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,” and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after “consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” — presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States.

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

Again in 2008, conservatives renewed their connection with Bush even though by then the evidence was clear that his administration had brought ab out any number of disasters. Still he was their apotheosis, his presidency the victory they had sought for so long. Polled by Gallup, the conservatives approved their ideal that the worst president ever had embodied:

Dec 11, 2008; George W. Bush remains popular among conservative Republicans (72% approve of him) despite his low overall approval rating.

The conservatives are trying very hard to scrape the remains of their perfected ideology off the windshield before voters recognize it. The extent to which they succeed is another catastrophe that will foul up the scene, and this country. We need to make the point as much as possible; the worst president ever, George W. Bush, was a real conservative, and succeeded in his ambition to achieve conservative principles. We are barely surviving the effects of conservatism now, if, that is, we do survive as a nation.

Oz by drurydrama (Len Radin) via flickr

The year was 2003, and in March it was the dot.com bust. Today we can look back in horror at U.S. investors buying into nothing more than creative business plans in droves, burying technological adventurers in millions. At the time, venture capital was desperately seeking any promising startup with a website to plunge investor funds into.

Probably the best known overnight failure is Pet.com, which even had a Superbowl ad using its symbolic talking sockpuppet. The site promised delivery to the home of pet supplies, but disappointed customers too many times to survive.

While there were a variety of reasons for investing heavily in dot.com companies that had never shown a profit, most investment vehicles had a share of these speculative ventures in their portfolios. In March of 2000, the high point was reached and a fall began that lasted over the next two years. Investors of all sorts lost as big as they had jumped in, and those investors included insurance companies.

The delusional factor was large in investing in speculative dot.com ventures with business plans most remarkable for their inventiveness. Going to stockholders with losses is always a painful experience. In Texas in 2003, there suddenly appeared to insurance companies a new reason for losses. That was the year that the insurance industry discovered it had been victimized by mold. “Black mold” losses were thrown up in 2003 as a blight not only on homeowners in the state, but on their premiums.

The suspicion that the sudden discovery of losses related to black mold, not a new fungus nor a new problem, were an artificial construction has never been substantiated. No smoking gun such as the recordings of Enron executives demanding shut-downs of power stations so they could overcharge customers has ever turned up. The whistle blowers such as insurance executive Wendell Potter are not coming out of the moldy woodwork.

That the insurance industry invented reasons to hike premiums which had no factual basis has been established, however. By blaming violent weather for its unconscionable rate hikes in 2003, the industry opened itself to some statistical questions that some intrepid reporters answered for consumers.

While bad weather and high premiums do tend to go together, the newspaper found that, among all states, Texas’ premiums were higher than expected given weather damage over the years. Texas has more tornadoes and hailstorms than any other state, federal weather data shows, but when the state’s land area is taken into account, its ranking drops. Texas ranked fifth in total damage from 1990 to 2007, according to the weather data. The insurance industry says Texas premiums have either dropped or held steady in the last two years and that Florida has surpassed Texas in average premiums.

In its analysis, The News used a statistical tool called linear regression, which can control for factors such as weather damage. It is a statistical way to level the playing field across all states for a fairer comparison. The newspaper’s analysis found that, even after controlling for weather damage, the average 2005 homeowners premium in Texas was about 50 percent higher than what it statistically should have been.

Of course, the insurance industry in Texas has paid well to keep itself ensconced in the protective arm of its regulatory body, the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI), and sympathetic lawmakers who do not see a problem with high premiums. Some of the evidence sought by reporters, who compiled the article referred to above, has never been obtained. The award of damages which occurred in a State Farm suit in 2004 is still under appeal.

The fact remains, though, that there was no sudden onslaught of black mold in Texas, though there was a dot.com bust that wiped out investor money. That the investor losses occurred simultaneously with the insurance industry’s appalling premium hikes – which it attributed to black mold – does not meet the test of credulity.

Losses occurred throughout investor circles, but not all investors had an easy source to redeem those losses. Insurance companies could charge their policy holders. They couldn’t tell policy holders the actual reason for their new hikes in premiums: their hysteria of investing in unproved dot.com prospective earnings. They could, however, tell policy holders about losses related to the insurance industry.

From such beginnings, the dreaded fungus now blighting Texas policy holders was born. Black mold belongs in a memorial yet to be established, honoring the greatest snake oil sales of all times.