Health Care post for Obama

Here's how single-payer health care helps people, in terms that "economic conservatives" can understand.

For any given insurance pool, the larger the pool is, the cheaper the cost for coverage is overall. You want to buy insurance from "Bob's health care" that covers 3 other people so far? Didn't think so. If one of those 3 gets big bills, you get hit hard. Ultimately, one single pool of all people in the country would be the cheapest-per-person insurance possible. Therefore, single-payer insurance is the cheapest insurance possible.

Now let's talk about unions. All of the union contract disputes in the last decade have hinged on the increased cost of the health care coverage of those contracts. I dare anybody to find a counter-example ot the previous sentence. Taking the cost of health care out of union negotiations removes most of the cost of those contracts, thus helping the industries involved.

Let's go a little bit larger. Here's an economic-conservative talking point for ya: business should not be burdened with the cost or trouble of managing their employees' health care plans. Ask a small businessman about the HR overhead in just managing such plans, much less paying for them. In fact, there's already an outsource industry regarding merely processing the paperwork for health care for businesses. It's stuff that they shouldn't have to deal with since it's not their core competency. Seriously, forget everything you know, and ask yourself - why do employers have to pay for health care? Why should they have to? Ask any small businessman about health care for their employees and they'll talk your ear off for the next 24 hours at least. Then ask the big 3 automakers. This hits business across the board already. There's no real reason it should have to.

Also, single-payer health care in America wouldn't even be "socialized" to the levels as provided in Canada or England; in our case, private doctors and hospitals would be reimbursed for providing care, rather than being state employees themselves, as they are under European models. In other words, it would still be privatized, thereby still allowing for efficiency incentives.

All we need is a basic/preventive (and emergency) level of health care covered for every citizen. Insurers could still sell "gold-plated" insurance to more affluent citizens.

As it is, the insured already pay for health care for the uninsured. If an uninsured person gets sick, they get sick or get over it until they go to the emergency room. If they go to the emergency room, then the cost runs to hundreds or thousands of times of the cost of having prevented it in the first place. Where does the cost come from for treating these uninsured? Here it gets interesting. Hospitals typically have nondisclosure agreements with drug companies, and cover their revenue to costs in some rather creative ways that are unique to the health care industry. Gave you a $200 Vicadin? How about that $120 blood test? Those are hidden transfer payments, baby. They're covering their emergency room costs by overcharging your insurance.

Normally, the first step would be to create transparency in the relationship between what hospitals charge the insured and the costs of treating the uninsured in their emergency room. But much of that is covered by nondisclosure agreements anyways, and besides is unnecessary. We can skip all of this problem by... single payer health insurance. If the presently uninsured had health care coverage up front, a $80 doctor's visit could prevent a $8,000 emergency room bill.

Unless some Republican is willing to step up and say "let them all die in the streets," and unless every doctor in America is willing to renounce the Hippocratic Oath entirely, then we're not only paying for the "uninsured" already, we're doing it in a way that produces the worst possible outcome: less care for more cost.

Single payer. It's not only the right thing to do, it's the profitable thing to do.

Hostages in Iraq

Apparently, Senate Democrats and Republicans are fighting back and forth about how to word (or whether to pass) their non-binding resolution saying... something vague. It certainly doesn't say that we should bring the Iraq "war" to an end. It doesn't even say that we should reduce troop levels, or perhaps shift our priorities back to Afghanistan. I think it's supposed to say something about how a troop increase would be vaguely "inconsistent with" something good, with enough subclauses and exceptions to render even that meaningless.

Still, for all of its milquetoast wishy-washiness, Republicans are convinced that it would be bad form for Congress to say anything unpleasant about anything that the Bush administration wants to do. Never mind that Bush, Cheney, and everybody on the White House payroll has stated again and again that they intend to ignore any Congressional resolutions purporting to limit their freedom of action, binding or non-binding; and wouldn't that make for a constitutional crisis of epic proportions!

The strong argument, which even many Democrats have fallen prey to, is that any attempt to limit, cut or otherwise put any kind of restrictions on the free flow of cash from Washington to Baghdad to Cheney's stock portfolio, would be equivalent to leaving our brave soldiers stranded in a foreign land without supplies or equipment. The reason that such a connection seems so plausible to so many reveals the true crisis that we should be talking about: it is clear the Bush & co. would gladly maintain or even increase troop levels in Iraq even if the funding did not exist to support their activities. Everyone, both Republicans and Democrats, know that any "power of the purse" action to curtail Iraqi funding could not be guaranteed to lead to a drawdown. Bush might just as likely leave our soldiers out there, starving and undersupplied, while pointing his bony finger at Congress all the while and blaming them for creating the situation.

In other words, our troops in Iraq are being held hostage.

We are forced to pay, year after year, billions upon billions of dollars to maintain them, "or else." Or else they'll start dying in far greater numbers. Or else they'll be cut off and starving. This administration will never willingly return them to us because they are the best bargaining chip they could hope to have. If our troops came home, the money flow would naturally stop. But as long as they're kept in harm's way, we are forced to keep paying.

This is, of course, all a big construct of big lies. What we in general, and Congress in particular need to realize, is we do have the power to stop him. The very fact that they repeat at every opportunity that we don't is the most telling point: as long as we believe them, they're right. Congress can easily put a stop to this, inject some common sense, and resolve this hostage situation by bringing our soldiers home.

They just have to realize that they have this power and exercise it..

The Rove Doctrine

In all of the discussion regarding the stupidity of escalating the conflict in Iraq, one thing that seems to be slipping through the cracks, and which would be highly instructive on the idea's merits, is just where such a plan came from.

It certainly didn't come from the Iraq Study Group.

It most definitely didn't come from the voters in November

Nor did it come from either the old or new Congress.

We also know that it didn't come from Bush's (most recent crop of ex-) generals, whom he famously consulted on his "listening tour" across town.

But if all of the informed parties that Bush went to for advice were against escalating troop levels, then how could he have possibly come to such a decision? As Sherlock Holmes said, "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

Thus, we are left with one option: Karl Rove. The "new strategy for Iraq" is not (as it might appear) actually a new strategy for fighting the conflict in Iraq, but rather a new strategy for fighting the politics of the Iraq issue. This is the only light in which escalation makes any sense, and it has the advantage of being consistent with the behavior of the Bush administration since its inception.

It's consistent with Bush's repeated framing of any issue in terms of what "message" it "sends." It's consistent with formulating governmental policy as whatever is most damaging to your political enemies. This administration habitually equates criticism of such policies as warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and torture, with refusal to conduct terrorist surveillance. He publicly and repeatedly stated last Fall that voting for Democrats equated to voting for terrorists.

It has been long pointed out that this administration, unlike any to previously occupy the White House, does not "do" policy. Rather, policy decisions are routinely framed as political decisions. What best plays to the base? What's most damaging to the other party? What "sends the right message?" That's the Rove Doctrine, in one phrase.

This is how you get to escalation in spite of every informed opinion on the subject of Iraq: It's not about Iraq at all, and it never was. It's about us.

More is Less

Lately I've been allowing my hankering for political discourse to die down a bit. I have a tendency to wander from interest to interest on a cycle lasting a two to three months on average - hence the gap between my last post and this. However, this won't go away, and it's bringing me back. After going about town "listening" to his own advisers in order to decide how to respond to the election's proof of the unpopularity of his war, Bush has decidered to increase troop levels in Iraq. That's right, increase. Not decrease.

But we've been down that road before:


[credit Lies.com]

That's what a troop increase looks like when you don't know how else to resolve the quagmire.

So how does Bush come by such a ridiculously stupid decision directly in the face of vast national demand to the contrary? Simple. For Dubya, every day is backwards day. Consider:

Immmediately after the Democrat victory, he said that he was willing to cooperate with the left - mere hours before attempting yet again to nominate John Bolton and a slew of rejected judges.

We're winning in Iraq. OK, maybe we're not winning, but we're not losing. And we don't do quagmires.

The White House definitely had conclusive evidence that Saddam had WMD's. (They'd have shown you the conclusive evidence, but it was so important it was classified. Still is.)

Torture? Yes! (But let's redefine that word to mean something else.)

Habeus corpus? No! (Nobody knows what that word means, so we can leave it alone.)

The NSA's wiretap program has oversight. That means it's legal. (Except that it doesn't have judicial oversight, since no warrants are involved. But what's one word - "judicial" - between friends?)

The people of Iraq will greet us as liberators. No? OK, the people of Iran will greet us as liberators.

We're turning the corner. We're turning the corner. We're turning the corner. We're turning the corner.

Rumsfeld isn't going anywhere! Rumsfeld is gone! (This is the "loyalty" president?)

Karl Rove works on policy. (thus proving that politics is policy in this administration). Paul Wolfowitz runs the World Bank. (Since when is he a finance guy? What qualifies him for this?) Nearly all regulatory agencies are run by former special-interest lobbyists of the industries to be regulated. (of which I have already blathered.)

Up is down. Black is white. Right is left. Bad is good. Time after time after time after time, when faced with a clear choice between a sensible option and a horrifically stupid option, Bush does precisely the worst thing imaginable.

This is what the decider does.

We Are Not At War

Now that England has openly admitted it, I feel a little less alone in speaking the unspeakable out loud:

We are not at war.

It's a hard thing to say. This is the dirty little secret that every American, from the most flag-waving right-winger to the most hand-wringing left-winger, carries around in the deepest chambers of their hearts, afraid to even think it, much less say it out loud. We spend all day in public spaces discussing the ramifications of our current war, how to resolve the war, why we went to war, and so forth. But when we're alone, in the quiet spaces of our mind, that fleeting thought lurks at the corners of our perception: this is not a war after all. And we know it to be true.

But, we think, what about the terrorists? If we don't wage war with them, then won't they get us? Won't they blow us up? The answer to that is, perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps they'll blow us up anyways. But starting wars in other countries won't stop them from doing whatever they plan to do. Starting real wars with real armies and real guns in order to stop those who use espionage methods against us is sort of like trying to kill bacteria with a baseball bat: not only won't it work at all, but you'll probably smash up a lot of your apartment trying.

Terrorists are stopped by police. Terrorists are stopped by intelligence agencies. Terrorists are stopped by the international cooperation that comes from an unwavering commitment to real diplomacy. Read any Tom Clancy or John LeCarre novel if you don't believe me. Nobody ever caught a terrorist by throwing an army at them.

The terrorists want us to think this is a war. In their minds, they are soldiers in a legitimate confrontation. 9/11 was a provocative act. It was specifically intended to provoke us into thinking we were at war. But that doesn't make it so. By buying into their claim that this is a war, by following their lead, we have lent legitimacy to their narrative. We support the story that they sell to their recruits. We prop them up even as we assail them. It doesn't matter how many terrorists we kill when in so doing we breed them at a greater rate. But there's no scoreboard, no number of dead terrorists after which we get to say we won. In order to stop terrorism, we have to stop the flow of terrorists. We have to defeat their narrative that this confrontation is valid. We have to stop fighting them on their own terms, in an arena of their choosing. Because if this is not a war, then they are not soldiers. If this is not a war, then they are nothing more than criminals, mere murderers.

This is not a war.

Congress did not declare war. In fact, it's been so long ago that Congress actually passed a declaration of war, and we've thrown armies into open-ended conflicts so often, that to speak of war hardly makes sense any more. The President declared it to be so, and shouts it to us often. He wants to be a "wartime president." In fact, he desperately needs to be a "wartime president" in order to make any kind of sense out of his own actions. But the Constitution quite explicitly states otherwise. A real war requires a hard, deliberative choice made by us, not by the President, nor by those who would pick a fight with us in order to magnify their own sense of importance. We decide. They don't decide for us. Besides, the President said it himself, long ago: "Major combat operations have ceased."

We are not at war. In fact, we never were.

This truth is the principal source of unease in our gut. It's the shaky feeling of vertigo we get as some part of us becomes aware that this overriding issue, this single framework that rules over every single aspect of our politics today - has no legs. It makes us uneasy when our leaders speak of "victory," when we don't know what "victory" means. What would it look like? Will one of our generals sit down at a table with the grand poobah of all terrorist groups and make him sign a declaration of surrender? Will the CIA prove that the last terrorist has now been caught or killed? If so, how could they prove such a thing? Will there be a tickertape parade and we'll get all our freedoms back?

How do we win a war that doesn't exist?

It's OK, America. We are not at war. Really, it's OK. Everything can be OK. We don't have to fight any more. We can do our best to stop terrorist plots and catch terrorists without having to send our children to fight and die halfway across the world in the wrong country. We can begin to secure our ports and our transportation systems and our water supplies, like we always should have. We can work with other countries instead of against them, to help convince their people that we really don't want to kill them, and to help actually catch anyone who tries to kill us. We don't have to fight anyone. They can't make us. And it's not too late to stop fighing. It's never too late.

We are not at war. This is not a war.

It's just a mistake.

DeLay Invents The Internet

TomDelay has announced that he's starting a new group, to be called "GAIN" (for "Grassroots, Activist and Information Network). Problems? Oh yeah, he's going to have problems.

Step one on their agenda should definitely be to raise some cash to buy the domain name "gain.org" from the folks who've had it parked for some years now. They'll surely be asking for a pretty penny once they see who's coming after it.

As it is, headquartering your "grassroots" organization's website at tomdelay.com is practically an admission that it's got nothing to do with principles and everything to do with trying to forge a new cult of personality. Step one in convincing recruits that your "movement" is independent of the individual behind it is to NOT NAME ITS WEBSITE AFTER YOU. As it is, any conservatives who might be interested in such an organization, but who may be hesitant about hitching their wagon to Tom DeLay's horse are automatically excluded from this group. It's not like he's just the president of their board of directors or something - the group's website IS HIS PERSONAl HOMEPAGE. How is this "grassroots?"

He's also going to have difficulties with the fact that any online political advocacy group, whether conservative or liberal, could accurately (and thus, legally) describe themselves in a grammatically correct sentence using his group's full name. For example: "MoveOn.org is a grassroots activist and information network." Thus anyone can water down his group's name, and he can't stop them. You can't legally trademark the correct use of the English language.

What's worse is that the site seems to express a confused attempt to capitalize on something that progressives have been doing well for quite a while now, and as such, doesn't seem completely clear how to define its boundaries. Is it the home page for a vote-drive network? A fundraising network? Is it Tom DeLay's personal website? His blog? A conservative blogger site in general? Is it about getting Republicans elected or is it about defining conservative principles? DeLay doesn't seem clear on what the differences are between these kind of sites. He just knows that "online activism" and "the blogosphere" are useful and effective modern political tools, so he wants one for himself: "Welcome to TomDeLay.com and thank you for visiting my new blog." Ooh look, it's just dripping with cachet!

Another problem is that unless DeLay has had a total personal change of heart, his site is already lying to us. Consider the following blurb: "Conservatives must act on First Principles. We must organize and act to protect the very principles of: order, justice and freedom that are the touchstones of our founding documents. We must act to speed the return of our government to its constitutional roots and we must organize to protect our freedoms from those who wish to deny them to us." Well, I'm all for that. I couldn't agree more. In fact, if I ever believed a word of it, I might even sign up myself.

Nearly all of the ethical and logical problems with the current state of conservative thought can be traced to a disconnect between first principles and present implementation. However, DeLay is himself one of the leading architects of that break. As Speaker of the House during some of the ugliest years that body has ever seen, he personally orchestrated the prevailing Republican policy that power is its own end. Under that policy, the principles of conservativism themselves are nothing more than tools to be cynically used and exploited as means to shore up his own personal power. Traditionally conservative principles have all suffered as a direct result of his tenure in office; not only the aforementioned order, justice and freedom, but also opportunity, liberty, and support for families as the essential atomic unit of American society.

The website is quite correct to say that "The election of 2006 was an example of what happens to a party and a movement when we fail to fight for the principles that brought us together in the first place." I would only add that this is what happens when you allow yourselves to be led by those who would gladly sacrifice those principles for their own sheer personal power. In doing so, DeLay, Gingrich, Hastert and many others (whether in the White House, Congress or the mainstream media) have twisted what at their core were once quite reasonable principles reflecting a cautious approach to American policy into a set of laughably distorted dogmatic "values" which reflect only the ability of the Republican leadership to manipulate a large portion of the electorate by obfuscating the issues. Here's a quick hint: every time a so-called "conservative leader" says we should re-think any of the provisions of the Constitution, that it's somehow patriotic to give up liberty for an illusion of safety, all true conservatives should be the first to shout "treason!" back. Or are you waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to come after your guns before you'll speak up?

But the biggest problem DeLay is going to have is trying to convince anyone that he's an outsider, a populist rabble rouser invading Washington from the farmland. Not that he isn't trying: "Over the course of my political life I have learned many things, one of which is that not all good ideas come from Washington, D.C.. In fact I think that most of the best ideas come from concerned citizens from all over the United States. Unfortunately, many D.C. insiders are simply incapable of looking outside the capital beltway for fresh opinions and new approaches that might otherwise help our nation." Now I want you all to repeat the following to yourself for at least the next ten years, because he's counting on us all forgetting one very important point: the only reason that DeLay is not presently a Washington insider is because he got kicked out for being completely corrupt.

This organization isn't a grassroots effort of any kind. It has nothing to do with conservative principles. It exists solely to lay the groundwork for a future attempt to resurrect DeLay's political career from the ashes of its self-immolation. Someday, when we've become accustomed to a new generation of incumbents and problems, and have allowed ourselves to forget what things were like under his tenure in office, DeLay expects to reappear in a new guise, as the outsider populist, the right-wing blogger and grassroots organizer who is going to bring Washington back to long-forgotten conservative principles. Kind of like Newt Gingrich is attempting to do now, only with a great deal more foresight.

Perhaps the first of these conservative first principles should be to stop allowing themselves to be cynically exploited by self-aggrandizing criminal users like DeLay.

Conservatism deserves better than this.

In Terms They Can Understand

Recently, there's some hubbub that the recent election's 35-0 skunking of the Republican party is somehow a mandate for "bipartisan, centrist" approaches to the problems that beset our nation. I'll leave it to others to discuss the ridiculousness of that meme. For my part, I'd like to actually explore what it might look like to reach across the national aisle, to translate liberal points into conservative terms. In that regard, I intend to make the case for a progressive approach to public policy, using the kind of pro-business language that Republicans claim to understand.

Many Republican primaries in the relatively recent past have put forth a host of "business conservatives" - those whose battle cry is "let's run this country like a business!" OK, let's. Let's actually take a close look at what sound business practices would look like when applied to America as a whole. Here are a handful of the arguments that could be made.


1. The R.O.I. of human capital

Let's say that your company (America, Inc.) has a significant number of employees (the poor), who, while granted that you're not paying them very much, aren't really getting very much work done - they aren't generating very much wealth for your company. Stockholders aren't happy with slim margins, but you can't fire anybody - "firing" someone from citizenship is nonsensical, and doesn't translate to this analogy. As such, common sense dictates that you should target precisely those employees for development, so that the investment in their earning power will produce enough ROI to widen those margins and improve your corporate profile.

Business language has a tendency to refer to weak points as "opportunities." Underemployment in America is just such an opportunity. There's more room for improvement in the amount of wealth that could be produced by the unemployed and working poor than in any other sector. Your small businesses and entrepeneurs are already doing the best they can (although some targeted assistance in these sectors probably wouldn't hurt). The growth of your large corporations is stagnant merely due to their vast bulk. In fact, our current method of focusing our resources on corporations has indeed left us with an overall economic growth rate widely characterized as "tepid." In order to do better, we need to focus on the "low hanging fruit" (to use another popular business term) which have the most potential for dramatic return on investment.

This isn't merely spending. It's an investment in underutilized human capital. By aggresively targeting those personnel resources which are underperforming, and developing their productivity to sustainable levels. After that, they will on average pay back that investment many times over. The goal should be to develop affluent citizens over time who will be able to simultaneously support the consumer economy and pay a greater return to tax revenues.

The current state of social welfare programs lie somewhere between inadequate support and attempts to merely move the beneficiary "off of welfare" as soon as possible, without regard to where they're moving to.

Confusing the issue, such programs actually count the number of people that they fail to serve as a success rate! It's not uncommon to hear "we've moved X people off of the welfare rolls this year, proving the program a success." To accurately measure the return on that program as an investment, its success should be determined by the actual economic condition of those who have gone through the program, rather than the sheer number of people merely kicked out of it into any job whatsoever. No program should count as success the number of people it refuses to serve.

However, continuing programs have historically failed to improve the real condition of their recipients as well. This is because they give an inadequate amount of blanket "support," keeping those recipients below the poverty line, with no attempt made to foster a permanent increase in their economic status. As a result, they have led to an unbreakable cycle of dependence on meager benefits. Such programs are correctly identified as throwing good money after bad, as they serve neither the best interest of the recipient nor that of the nation; half-measures often produce zero results. In addition, such programs deduct 100% of pre-tax earnings from benefits, and thus actually financially disincentive recipients from working!

An actually effective approach to the underdeveloped human capital problem would not be characterized as a "safety net" but rather as more of a "safety trampoline." A spending level heretofore unprecedented in social welfare programs (i.e. enough to actually do the job) could over time end up costing less than traditional programs, since recipients would only need to stay in the program for a limited time.

Such a program would employ focused, complete expenditures and services targeting specifically those barriers that stand between a given beneficiary and a significantly improved way of life. For example, a benefit package for a given recipient might include not only education expenses, but also targeted assistance with child care, transportation, housing and food assistance during the entire period. Counseling assistance should be integrated into this approach from beginning to end, in order to determine what reasonable package of benefits would best fit for a given recipient's life goals, and to help them stay on track. In addition, only 50% (or some negotiable portion) of pre-tax earnings should be deducted from benefits, in order to create a natural incentive to increase their earning power as they transition out of the program.


2. Effective economic management

One of the philosophical objections to proposals such as that sketched above is that a country which relies upon a thriving free market segment should seek to rely on the free market completely, and avoid any attempts to "meddle" or otherwise manipulate macroeconomic conditions. This philosophy is often based on a dogmatically held view that completely unfettered free markets will somehow naturally resolve all social ills whatsoever, rather than simply create supply to match demand.

However, basing practices on dogma is not necessarily realistic, and therefore constitutes poor business management practice. A historical comparison of economies would serve as data to realistically demonstrate which macroeconomic techniques actually serve our goals.

History demonstrates repeatedly that the inevitable end-product of absolute laissez-faire capitalism closely resembles the common image of the third-world "Banana Republic:" there is a small handful of extremely wealthy individuals, an eroded middle class, and the vast majority of people live in abject poverty, whereas the government consists of little more than its military arm. This scenario has occurred in a great many nations where unfettered capitalism has held sway over a long period, particularly in South America.

Such a situation can hardly be described as thriving capitalism; it would be more aptly described as nothing more than "economic anarchy." And while the handful of rich people in such environments may do well relative to the local median income (which is negligible), it could easily be argued that even those same people would do better operating within an environment with a dynamic and productive majority middle class.

In contrast, the United States itself did not achieve its economic dominance as a world power until the need to recover from the Depression forced it to apply reasonable rules and regulations to encourage sustainable business practices. At the same time, it invested in human and other infrastructure in order to foster an economic climate within which business could thrive. Worldwide, the existence of such rules and programs at a reasonably moderate level consistently coincides with those countries/periods which we count as "prosperous."

The alternative to pure economic chaos is not only absolute totalitarian communism, and to believe so is indicative of extremely childish thinking.

Intelligent and cautious regulation, investment and intervention is necessary to the development of a thriving, sustainable, economic climate. Such an economic climate fosters, rather than inhibits free enterprise.

So let's go back to our analogy. Although it is widely recognized as foolishness for business leaders to attempt to micromanage every aspect of their companies, it would be no less foolish to fail to perform any management at all, to allow the company to run adrift with zero guidance or control over its destiny. But such a situation is precisely analogous to the dogmatic stance of laissez-faire economics.

It is not the business of any one business to manage the economic climate within which they exist. But it is necessary. As such, it is the proper role of government to do so.


3. Globalization as sustainable practice

Many liberals currently decry free trade entirely. However, economic globalization, like technological advancement, is an inevitable worldwide process. As such, merely complaining about its negative consequences fails to produce the kind of discussion which can lead to its intelligent management. However, these issues related to free trade which liberals complain about are in fact not merely questions of justice but are, in the long term, actually self-destructive economic practices.

As mentioned previously, American history has demonstrated that the careful establishment of regulations and economic programs to manage its economy has coincided directly with the rise of America as an economic as well as political superpower. A comparison to disparate societies shows further that precisely such an environment is in fact necessary to allow unlimited economic growth in the long term. Therefore, it should be taken as an alarming development that as free trade expands globally, corporations are using this opportunity to shift production into other regions specifically to avoid those very same regulations and economic programs.

The current model of corporate globalization is little changed from the great mercantile empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. Appearances to the contrary, it is at heart quite a simple process:

1. Divide a portion of the world into (underdeveloped) producer nations and (developed) consumer nations


2. Create a flow of resources or goods from the producer nation to the consumer nation


3. Tap the reverse flow of money from the consumer nation to the producer nation


4. Use a portion of the proceeds to induce the political bodies in both nations to support the arrangement, including the use of force if necessary

It would not be out of line to characterize such an arrangement as "exploitative." While demonstrably lucrative, such arrangements have been proven time and again to be unsustainable over the long term. For one thing, relying on political bodies or military advantage to sustain a business practice puts control over its support up to chance. For another this typically leads to the long-term destabilization of the producer society once the arrangement finally fails, thus sacrificing the opportunity to maintain alternative economic arrangements. Nearly all of the regions of the world where it is extremely difficult to do business due to political antipathy or instability have become so due to prior use of exactly this sort of "slash and burn" arrangement.

To go back to our analogy of running the country like a business, any business leader who sacrificed significant long-term opportunities in order to "cash in" in the short term would be considered to be doing poorly, and that judgement would be reflected harshly in that company's stock rating. Any company could easily outperform all competitors in a single quarter by selling off all of their assets and laying off all of their employees. But it would be utterly nonsensical to do such a thing. It would in fact, consitute a refusal to do business. Sustainability is a necessary comoponent to any economic enterprise.

The current globalization arrangements sacrifice the opportunity to develop a truly larger pool of consumer markets in addition to mere productive capacity. They seek to maximize their accessible cash flow by maximizing the economic differentiation between producer and consumer nations, not only in terms of monetary power and wages, but also in terms of environmental and worker protections. In addition, good corporate citizenship to promote democracy, human and civil rights is at odds with the policy of supporting the kinds of governments which make the those economic arrangement their first priority. Although engaging in such practices would reduce the short-term cash flow available through free trade arrangements, they would in the long term develop a host of newly developed economic environments which could produce not only resource extraction and goods production, but also thriving services and consumer markets.

Imagine the financial benefit to any company of multiplying its available consumer base by a factor of 100 or more. That's the opportunity that we discard by failing to intelligently manage the process of globalization.

Ideally, each nation should recieve a rating from an independent international body which takes into account that nation's human and civil rights practices, its commitment to democratic institutions, and its legislated protections for such factors as worker conditions, safety, environmental protections and both human and physical infrastrucure development. Trade barriers or tariffs would then be indexed to this rating. This would allow for underdeveloped nations to have a direct economic incentive to improve their profile towards one which fosters a thriving local economic climate, rather than being both economically and politically disincentived to do so.

Again: the Depression and the history of many other nations over many other periods have proven the ultimate failure of economics as exploitation. No business can expect to thrive independently of the health of the economic environment within which it operates. As more and more businesses step into a global environment, it is to their benefit to consider the long-term health of the global economy. In order for globalization to succeed in the long term, we have to manage it in such a way as to develop, rather than exploit, the world. The necessary management techniques to do this have already been demonstrated as effective in developed nations. We refer to these as "rights." All we need do is incrementally export them.


4. Corporations are not the most effective economic entities

At the center of laissez-faire economic dogma is the argument that thriving free markets are produced by incentive, and that therefore all forms of incentive should be maximized. Regulations and infrastructure investment programs admittedly limit incentive to at least some degree. Heretofore, I have only argued for targeted, intelligent restrictions which have been proven to lead to a significant improvement in economic climate.

Although there is certainly a place for large corporations in any viable free market model, the current practice of focusing economic management towards the benefit of corporations is one which inevitably fails to produce the best return for the nation as a whole.

As discussed previously, the bulk of any large company itself prevents it from responding dramatically to policies intended to benefit it, in terms of economic growth or wealth production. The stock of large corporations are called "blue chip" for a reason - they are effectively a large pool of stagnant money, a good place to "park" an investment safely while waiting for a good growth opportunity.

This is because a corporation is not an individual. As such, a corporation's growth does not necessarily equate to incentive for any group of persons.

To illustrate this point more clearly, consider what happens when a corporation is "broken up" into two new entities. Although the capitalization for each is half of that of the whole, the workers within each company face quite the same structure of advancement and pay grade than they had previously - in many cases, better. The stockholders of the corporation also benefit by the split, now holding one share in each of the new entities, which now benefit over the long term from working in a more competitive environment. At no point is the benefit reduced for any individual class of persons when that of the corporation is.

On the one hand, providing tax cuts or other benefits to large corporations or wealthy individuals may produce a noticeable short-term increase in a given economic indicator, such as investment or employment, due to the sheer size of the few entities involved. However, such benefits would produce a much greater return in overall economic growth if they targeted small or enterprise-class businesses or middle class individuals, as those sectors are proven to be much more dynamic in terms of cash flow, productivity, wealth generation and the creation of new markets. They're more nimble, and therefore respond more dramatically to changes.

Incentive, opportunity, and overall macroeconomic R.O.I. are to be found in individual and small-group enterprise. In large corporations, opportunity and potential has largely been exhausted, and the margin of return on investment in that sector is correspondingly minimal.

This point is not intended to demonize corporations, or to characterize them as merely "bad." Merely assigning blame is one of the greatest management blunders known, yet it has been inexplicably integral to public policy discussions for a long time now. Rather, the above point merely intentds to say that government resource allocation intended to benefit the economy is better focused on other sectors than corporate.

Conclusion

The above is a partial list, a starting point. There are surely many other issues that liberals and conservatives seem to disagree on, but when explained in the correct terms are merely a question of effective and intelligent practice. I do believe that for every apparently intransigent issue, there is an approach whereby the ethical thing to do and the effective thing to do agree perfectly. It's usually just a question of analyzing the problem in politically neutral terms.

This just goes to underscore the basic point that all politics is communication. Whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative, all decent people have the same values, all reasonable people work towards the same ends, and all intelligent people can find effective means to achieve them. Therefore, all partisanship and controversy is nothing more than obfuscation coming from those politicians and pundits whose own self interest lies in keeping the rest of us divided from one another, in leading our common interest to fail.

Do You Like Apples?

America is under attack from cowardly terrorists. They are attacking us because they hate freedom. These terrorists use fear and violence in their quest to overthrow the secular governments in their region and seek to replace them with a twisted and extremist version of the dominant religion.

Naturally, I'm talking about Republicans.

For far too long, neocons have been projecting their own secret self-image onto others, and labeling everyone around them as enemies. They continue to insist upon falsities so blatant they could come right out of Alice in Wonderland: warrantless wiretaps "have oversight," we are "winning the war" in Iraq. I would not be suprised at this point to see Dick Cheney on Face The Nation stating categorically that up is down. The world simply has not seen this level of nonsensical babble in public discourse since the height of Soviet Communism.

It's high time that we simply took their insane statements and threw them back in their faces. There's more support for it. Consider the following points:


Republicans are radical extremists

This first point is tricky, because they try to confuse us with this one all the time. Typically, the neocons like to scream that any centrist position is "far-left extremism" and that their position is the "middle." But they have forgotten what real far-left extremism actually looks like. Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front are examples of extreme leftism. Hillary Clinton is decidedly not. Walter Cronkite and Jim Lehrer are examples of the political middle. Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto are not.

As it stands presently, the Democratic party has been dragged far from its left wing and now stands solidly in the middle; no major Democrat even bothers to try to agitate for actual liberal positions these days (except for perhaps Dennis Kucinich). On the other hand, the Republican party has been held captive by their most extremist elements for a long time now. Compared to them, even Ronald Reagan would count as a "left-wing radical."


Republicans are cowards

They react to danger from a position of fear, rather than one of confidence. A courageous response to 9/11 would have been to take a comprehensive and intelligent analysis of the causes of attacks on the U.S. and then to face those causes directly. Instead, we invaded Iraq, overreaching wildly and inappropriately to the actual threat. A natural response to fear and confusion is to lash out blindly; we have done, and continue to do, just that.

To make this point more clearly, ask yourself: what would a brave leader look like? A brave leader would have calmed the nation, and made the nature of the threat clear and thoroughly understood. A brave leader would have used all the tools at his or her disposal to deal with that threat: not only military retaliation, but also international police cooperation, improved port security, careful intelligence, and diplomatic engagement. Compared to such a creature, Bush is clearly its antithesis: a coward.


Republicans raise taxes

Economics 101: if you spend money, you have to get enough money to pay for it. You can either pay for it now or add some of it towards your debt. Either way, it has to be paid for. And if you add it to your debt, it will cost you more to pay it off than you got. The government gets its income through taxation. So when the government spends lots of money, youre taxes get increased, whether now or at some point in the future with interest.

In 2000, the Republicans inherited a country with a balanced budget, and have since then increased the national debt to 8.6 trillion dollars. That's 8.6 trillion dollars that will have to be paid by us with our taxes. Dividing per capita, the Republicans have raised your lifetime tax burden by $28,666 and counting.

So before you parrot "Democrats raise taxes" you should ask yourself exactly when was the last time that the policies of a Democrat-controlled government led to stagnant economic growth and relatively high taxes? The 1970's? Certainly not the Clinton years. But when was the last time the policies of a Republican-controlled government led to exactly the same situation? Right now!


Republicans are terrorists

Merriam-Webster defines terrorism as "the systematic use of terror (a state of intense fear), especially as a means of coercion." The Republican party has been attempting to coerce us into maintaining their power using a state of intense fear for the past five years. Therefore they are terrorists, as the word is correctly defined.

Now, I'm not one of those who claims that the Bush administration ever knocked down any of our own buildings. But the fact remains that he has knocked down the buildings of another country without provocation. He has killed people in order to support his own power base. Shock and awe.

That's terrorism.


Republicans hate freedom

See warrantless wiretaps, torture, and suspension of habeus corpus, just for starters. The protections of individual rights are viewed as obstacles to a party which lacks the ability to deal with foreign threats without violating our freedoms. Thus, their ineptitude becomes totalitarianism. Such protections as are afforded by individuals against the state in the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions are labeled as "quaint" by those who see us as operating under a "new paradigm."

Such a paradigm, if one asserts that it exists, could only be called "post-American."


Republicans hate Democracy

The "plenary executive" argument is a demonstration of just that. Bush himself has stated that he would prefer to be a dictator. Everyone involved in the Bush administration has at one time or another expressed the feeling that they have the ability to defy other branches of government. Cheney has stated that he intends to refuse the subpeona power of Congress.

And then there's the electronic voting thing, and the gerrymandering, and the voter suppression, and the 2000 election intervention by the Supreme Court, and so on ad nauseum.


Al Qaeda wants you to vote Republican

The Bush administration blunders and overreacts to every provocation, while behaving as a caricature of the "great Satan" enemy that Islamic extremists would have America portray. By doing so, this administration, and the Republicans who consistently support their actions provide material aid and comfort to other extremist terrorist groups who need someone to play "bad guy" for their recruiting efforts.

Seriously, if you were Osama Bin Laden, would you rather have Bush in office mired in Iraq continuously while leaving America undefended in any reasonable way, or someone like John Kerry, who would most likely make intelligent choices right off the bat? Would you rather have someone who refuses to engage in dialogue with the Middle East or someone who might very likely attempt to sway the region towards moderation? So long as Bush stays in office, a large subset of the Islamic world is given a clear example supporting every one of Bin Laden's talking points.


Republicans are in league with the Devil

Most end-time Millenial Christian scenarios involve our secular institutions of power falling under the sway of someone who pretends to be a Christian while at the same time fomenting war, poverty and hatred throughout the world. Bush presents himself as a Christian while at the same time fomenting war, poverty and hatred throughout the world.

Jesus didn't have much to say about abortion or gay marriage; in fact, he said exactly nothing about either of those issues. But he did talk quite a lot about social justice, equating wealth itself with a state of sin, and excoriated the heresy involved in striving to appear publicly pious. He promoted the peaceful resolution of conflict, as well as respect for people of different faiths. Today's Republican party attempts to fool Christians into believing that their own religion is less about the issues Jesus actually spoke about and more about divisive issues of their own making.

As classically defined, the Devil is an entity who attempts to lie to Christians about what their own religion entails so that they will go against its original precepts. Republicans do this. Therefore, they do the Devil's work.


In Conclusion

Now, one might say "I'm a Republican but I don't do those things." You might say that while you decry certain actions or subsets of the Republican party, you still feel that overall they're the good guys. But that's a cop-out. Because the Republican Congress of the last twelve years has repeatedly and consistently appointed the worst among them to positions of leadership. If they get caught, they try to change the rules to keep their lawbreakers in power. The Republican Congress has refused Bush nothing, and has supported him at every turn. They have actively dismantled institutions in charge of investigating executive malfeasance and misappropriation.

Whenever you vote for any Republican, you vote for those who either are, or who themselves support, these radical extremist, cowardly, freedom-hating, tax-and-spend Satanic terrorists. Whenever you call yourselves a Republican, or give your voice to their positions, you lend material aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States of America. The Republican Party itself constitutes a clear and present danger to the security of our nation.

Republicans are evil, as evil is defined.

How do you like them apples?

Half a Billion For Swift Boat and "The Pet Goat"

With two years still remaining in his term, it seems that George W. Bush already wants his friends to give him $500,000,000.00 for his Presidential library, fully twice what he raised for his own re-election in 2004.

Lest you think such a sum is par for the course, consider that Reagan's library cost a mere $57 million dollars, and that includes storage hangars for both his versions of Air Force 1 and 2, which were decommissioned at the end of his term. The previous high water mark is Clinton's library, which cost $165 million dollars and is designed to look like a giant mobile home jacked up on concrete blocks (I'm not kidding).

This would have been a perfect opportunity to make Clinton look like a spendthrift by comparison, to make his party look good on paper, but W. apparently can't bring himself to do it. Not only does he want to spend half a billion dollars on the thing, but they've already begun evicting people to make room for it. Using eminent domain, no less.

One of the functions of Presidential libraries is to try to make a President's legacy look good after they leave office, but Bush's image is going to need a lot of work. To this end, his plan is explicitly designed to include a new right-wing think tank solely dedicated to figuring out how to continue to advance the neocon agenda after Bush is gone.

I can't imagine that very much of the $500m is going to be spent on books or other documentation, since this most secretive administration in the nation's history is likely to classify nearly everything of interest to scholars and citizens. About the only thing that scholars are likely to be allowed to examine is a single copy of "The Pet Goat" that Bush continued to read on September 11th after the second plane hit. And maybe some White House Christmas cards. The portion of the facility dedicated to making presidential documents available to the public should probably take up about the space of a broom closet.

Other than the function of maintaining public records, many libraries also have a function which gives something back to their community or to the nation. For example, Bush Sr's library endowment includes an entire College of Public Service which is managed by Texas A & M University. Typically the idea seems to be to display exhibits or give back to the nation in such a way as to make a president look good as a side effect. But W. is never that subtle. His plan is not a college, nor a museum, but a think tank of all things. This endowment is designed to see to it that people will remain employed to apologize for this administration's mistakes not only now, but far into the future.

For some time now, I've been looking forward to a future where W. is loathed and held up as an example of what not to do. An inevitable consequence of healing the intensely partisan divide that he created would be for the broad mainstream of both parties to see clearly what he has done to our nation, and hopefully to resolve never to allow ourselves to be so divided and manipulated again. But in order to fulfill their mission, Bush's Presidential Library think tank would have to continue to work to keep the nation as partisan and divided as it can, because the moment that most of America comes together to look at the facts, Bush's "legacy" will go up in a puff of smoke. Therefore, unlike even the most far-right think tanks to date, this one will not have even the most flimsy of other excuses for existing, such as attempting to craft public policy that they think is good for America. They will be openly and completely devoted to keeping partisan hack jobs alive forever, swift-boating our political system for eternity.

In other words, it looks like most of a half a billion dollars is going to be spent through the Presidential Library system, in order to fund yet more right-wing neocon hackery to invent further ways to pervert our national discussion. W. has finally figured out a way to politicize the last remaining institution of American Democracy that was supposed to be above politics.

I, for one, can think of no more fitting tribute for this President.

The Penguin Agenda

Neil Cavuto of FOX News says that the animated movie "Happy Feet" is offensive to him. Not for the usual reasons that crazy pundits find movies offensive, but because it references man-made ecological challenges that the protagonist penguins must face. Said Cavuto, "I though it was like an animated 'Inconvenient Truth.' I half expected to see an animated version of Al Gore to pop-up."

Tellingly, nowhere in the exchange between Cavuto and Holly McClure (the wingnuts' current pet movie reviewer since Michael Medved moved into full time punditry) does anyone make any claim regarding human activities and the environment. That is, they never even bother to argue that overfishing and garbage dumping aren't a problem. Their point is rather that these facts are somehow partisan, and should therefore not be "foisted" on children.

I just don't know where to start with the crazy. First of all, FOX News has been pulling a partisan bait-and-switch game since they launched, by pretending to be a news channel when they are actually a propaganda machine. But let's be specific about that. According to his bio on their website, Cavuto is "anchor of Your World With Cavuto, the No.1 business news show on cable." Anchor of a news show, it says. About business. Actual news anchors are supposed to commit to the practice of "journalism," a central tenet of which involves the elimination of "bias." I don't want political opinions foisted on me when I sit down to find out what's going on in business news. And I can't imagine what looking for supposed political bias in a children's movie could possibly have to do with either news or business.

Secondly, whether or not penguins and other wildlife are negatively impacted by oil drilling, garbage or overfishing is a question of fact, not opinion. In other words, Cavuto explicitly states that he objects to children being exposed to facts. This itself should be sufficient to discredit him as anyone whose opinion should be listened to for advertising profit.

The conflation of opinion with fact is a longstanding wingnut trick. They like to preface their statements with "I believe," as in "I believe that we are winning the war on terror." If opinions are substituted with facts, then one is free to lie at will. You're not really a deceiving bastard, just a little out of touch with reality!

But regarding animated movies and environmental messages, they have always been intertwined. Remember Bambi? "Man is in the forest!" This admixture isnt' because of a secret Jewi - er, leftist conspiracy running Hollywood, it's simple logic. If a child is going to go watch a movie about anthropomorphic talking animals in the wild, he or she may take an interest about actual animals in the wild. This may lead to information about challenges those animals face, such as predators. The greatest challenges nearly all wild animals face at present are related to human activities. That's just how it is. So if you want to present a reasonably consistent story, you would have your protagonist anthropomorphic animals facing such challenges in the movie.

Besides, there's nothing Cavuto can really do about it. Penguins are well known leftist agitators, and the penguin conspiracy is far too broad at this point for even FOX news to stop. In addition to shilling for Al Gore, penguins promote the gay agenda. Penguins are also used promote open source software, which is clearly a communist utopian movement that harms corporate profits. Not to mention Sparky. So, Mr. Cavuto, as you can see, it's not Hollywood that's out to push the radical leftist agenda.

It's the penguins.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Impeachment

Speaker Pelosi says that impeachment is off the table, which has prompted cautious sighs among Republicans who feel that it would somehow be unfair to hold the Bush administration accountable for their actions, as well as cautious resentment among the neo-Internet Democrats who feel that it's far beyond time we started actually fighting using the same down 'n dirty (lack of) rules that our foes have employed since 1994. But it isn't much fun to be in the position of hoping that your party's leaders are lying to you. Fortunately for us all (including the long-term health of the Republican Party), everyone seems to be forgetting a few things.

First of all, this "on/off the table" phrase is incredibly misleading. As it has been most recently employed by Bush to hint that he might like to nuke Iran, one would think that taking something "off the table" must amount to a solemn vow that you would never, ever do it. In reality, it merely means that you don't have the intention of doing it right now. Grown-ups understand that things can be taken off and put back on "the table" as circumstances require. Before even using "the i word," testimony must be brought to Congress.

Secondly, everybody knows that Democrats are "flip floppers." Unlike Republicans, upon getting new information, Democrats actually have the ability to change their minds, utilizing a process known as "thinking." Therefore, for a Democrat, declaring an intention not to impeach at the present time in no way rules out impeachment at a future date. In fact it would be irresponsible of any Congress to merely start a fishing expedition for evidence to support a desired outcome. It would similarly be irresponsible for Pelosi to state that she had such a goal in mind until the appropriate processes were completed first. Take a close look, Republicans - this is what a responsible Congress looks like, in stark contrast to previous Congressional hearings into subjects such as Whitewater and Vince Foster's suicide.

So, out of the vast array of Congressional hearings waiting in the wings, which would be most likely to bear the delicious, juicy fruit of a Presidential impeachment? Let's look at a choice few:


9/11 Commission II

Almost as if they were frightened to complete their duty, the 9/11 commission famously tabled the question regarding whether intelligence had been manipulated to lead us into Iraq and adjourned indefinitely. The resumption of this commission under a Democratic chair to finish its assignment will inevitably uncover how one gets from scads of CIA-collected rumors which their own analysts discounted, to a final CIA summary stating that they know for a fact that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Numerous other instances have occurred whereas items that the CIA had excised entirely from their reports later turned up in the mouths of our elected leaders.

Unfortunately, this one is going to go down like Iran-Contra. Sure, it's big. In fact, lying to get us into war is the one thing that lefties hate Bush for the most, but it won't stick. The administration will be able to shed a thick ablative shield of flunky scapegoats and then paint themselves as the mere victims of their own incompetent underlings. We'll all know it's a lie, but there won't be any smoking guns here. Still, this should hopefully discredit him to Nixonian levels, as well as root out the politicized bureaucracy installed in our intelligence services in favor of people actually willing to do their jobs.


Secret Prisons

On this, they are going to try to get away with their "law is unclear" game, dancing around on definitions (Does it apply to this foreigner? On that soil?) and employing delay tactics until no one is sure precisely why it's illegal.

Here's why it's illegal: when these occurred, the obligation of the U.S. Government to abide by Habeas Corpus was not a matter of Geneva Conventions or international treaty, but simply of Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution which simply states that "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." As we are not presently in a state of either rebellion or invasion, claims regarding public safety are not relevant. Furthermore, this section of the Constitution notably does not refer to the legal or citizenship "status" of the person held. Habeas Corpus is not a right of citizens but rather a requirement placed upon the behavior of the Executive Branch. There are no other exceptions to this requirement, and no context which could change its meaning.

But wait! What about The Military Commissions Act of 2006? Didn't Bush get permission from the Republican Congress after the fact? Well, setting aside the fact that no Act of Congress can override an Article of the Constitution, the MCA attempts to absolve Bush's actions retroactively. In legal terms, that makes it an Ex Post Facto law. However, this is also explicitly verboten by the very same Article 1, Section 9 of the very same Constitution: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."

Dadburn pesky Founders, they thought of damn near everything. Dadburn pesky Constitution. Bush probably should have read the silly thing before he took an oath to uphold it. Now, whether or not this constitutes a crime per se may be a difficult point of law, but whether or not Bush violated his Oath of Office is quite clear. That oath was to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution told him to uphold Habeas Corpus. He chose to do otherwise, so he broak his oath.


Warrantless Wiretaps

This one is a slam dunk. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act which governs this area of law explictly states that wiretaps require a warrant from a court. Bush has publicly stated that he authorized wiretaps without such warrants. There's no wiggle room on this. There are no legal exceptions or loopholes that he could possibly employ to get through or around the requirement for warrants. "Speedy" Gonzales & friends may talk around it all they like, but there's really no legal question on this whatsoever. And it doesn't matter what rhetoric he employs to appeal to the public that he should have been allowed to do what he did. The law is the law. This law is very clear. The President violated this very clear law. Presidents who violate laws get impeached. Period.


And so:

For each of the above points (and others), the pertinent facts will be placed before Congress, on the record. Once that is done, it would be a gross dereliction of duty for them not to impeach.

But even with all of this, until fairly recently I was filled with a vague sense of unease whenever the subject of impeachment came to mind. Not that I wasn't all for the impeachment of Bush, Cheney and whoever they care to cast off in their wake, but somehow I felt just a little bit like a partisan hack to admit it. Call it another form of liberal guilt, if you will. Here's what changed my mind and made it all easier: I merely asked myself "what about the Presidency itself?"

It would be one thing if all of the mean people currently in charge of the country wandered off into retirement and allowed saner heads get back to the business of putting the United States back together. Perhaps it would be better if we just moved on in 2008 and turned our backs on this ugly chapter of American history. After all, I'm a bleeding heart liberal softy ain't I? Give the poor schmucks a break and just put 'em out to pasture.

Unfortunately, that would set a precedent most foul. History would be written that these actions taken by these people went unpunished, leaving open-ended legal questions that a future President might exploit (maybe even a Democrat). We would always know what could happen, and that we did nothing to stop it last time. Thus, it is essential to the future health of the Union that all participants in the malfeasance of this administration be legally smacked so damn hard that it echoes forward throughout history, such that future generations of Chief Executives won't dare even think about trying to place themselves above the law for an instant.

Ultimately, no piece of paper, however venerable, has the power to enforce itself. The Constitution only "works" when the people in charge of executing it actually follow its precepts. This very thin point is all that stands between the United States and pure totalitarianism. When a President simply refuses to do what the Constitution says, the Union is forever imperiled. As such, violation of the Presidential Oath of Office itself must be considered an impeachable offense or else our Constitution may as well be written on toilet paper. This is why impeachment is necessary, completely irrespective of whether it is desireable.

So, whether you're a vaguely guilty moonbat or a panicky terrified wingnut, don't worry about the inevitable impeachment. It won't happen just because Bush is an idiot and a jerk, and it won't happen just because his lies are killing people. It won't happen because he is outnumbered by Democrats, and it certainly won't happen as revenge for Clinton. This is far, far more serious than the little partisan tit-for-tat games so beloved and feared by shrill Republican "strategists." Rather, impeachment will happen solely because it is a necessary step towards restoring freedom and liberty to America.

So relax. After all, freedom and liberty were supposed to be bipartisan concerns, right?

Right?

Of Foxes and Henhouses

To characterize Bush's tendency to appoint extremists to oversee agencies that those extremists hate as "alarming," would be putting things mildly. The fact that he continues to do so directly after the Democratic victory in both houses of Congress is nothing less than a warning shot across their bow that, for all his talk of being "above the fray," Bush intends to continue to politicize every aspect of American life at all levels. As if that point weren't made quite clearly by the very fact that Bush's campaign manager continues to oversee policy in any official capacity, Bush now enters his lame duck phase continuing to overstock the bureaucracy with partisan hacks. Although this most recent appointment does not require Senate confirmation, Bush presents the heretofore unconsidered counterexample as to why it should.

Ahem: Eric Keroack has been appointed to head the family planning services for the Department of Health and Human Services. As such, he will be responsible for any federal programs regarding the promotion and distribution of birth control. And what experience qualifies this worthy for such a position? Simply that he was previously director of "A Women's Concern," a group which opposes the promotion and distribution of birth control.

Setting aside for the moment all of the obvious arguments regarding the relationship between restricting birth control and the occurrence of abortion, it would seem shocking that a sitting president should appoint someone to oversee an agency who would obviously like to see that agency razed to the ground... if this weren't merely another instance in a long line of exactly that behavior. Bush has a tendency to put foxes in charge of henhouses, apparently for no other reason than that he is not fond of hens. It's like putting the enemy's generals in charge of your own army because you want to lose - but Iraq is another story.

The first thing that comes to mind is, what if the shoe were on the other foot? What if a Democrat in office put Tre Arrow in charge of the Department of the Interior? Ann Berlin in charge of Agriculture? How about Ralph Nader in charge of Commerce? Obviously the right-wingers would rightly scream that such a President had gone mad, and was instituting a dangerous policy that would lead directly to the destruction of the American economy. But there would be essentially no difference between that and the current administration's appointments, in that putting single-issue radicals in charge of their governmental nemeses is, to put it gently, an irresponsible pattern of behavior. Adjusting the mandate of governmental agencies is a job which should only appropriately be done via the legislature, as it should involve debate and public consideration. But to do so merely by executive appointment is nothing more or less than dereliction of duty, committed by both the appointee and the President himself.

However, this raises a larger and more difficult issue: what can be the proper political response to those who run for office with the intent of destroying government from within? It's not like we didn't have warning. The Rand/Goldwater/Reagan/Bush philosophy has been presented clearly and thoroughly enough before now, even as it has become increasingly strident and extremist over the past 50 years. These Republicans have stated loudly and at every possible moment that they would prefer to see all government agencies ground to a complete halt, and will work to do so whenever they can get away with it. The complete destruction of government itself (except for the military) has been explicitly and openly stated in platforms and campaign promises. And now, with this appointment and others, with every incompetent misstep and failure to act, we see those promises fulfilled. We can hardly say that we shouldn't have been expected to see it coming. Inept, unworkable government is both the premise and agenda of neoconservatism, after all. The apparent ineptitude of the Bush administration is therefore a matter of intentional philosophy, not of accident. They mean to screw everything up, and are doing so on purpose.

It isn't really possible to scold someone for destroying (or "reforming," to use the Gingrichese) that which they believe it is their moral duty to destroy. One can't shame these people into feeling bad for razing necessary governmental programs which they strongly believe are not only unnecessary, but actively harmful as well. To a lesser extent, they believe the same of all government (except for the military). Bush and his ilk are simply not cognizant of concepts such as the responsibility and duty of governmental bodies to perform their office faithfully. To the neocon right wing, all of government is nothing more than a pit into which their heroes are willing to descend in order to slay its monsters. It is not going out on a limb to state that such persons are well out of contact with reality, and should be kept as far as possible from holding offices in the government that they purport to hate so fervently. Unfortunately, the rest of us still have to deal with them, at least for the time being. The question is, how? After all, it's not like Congress can use the "power of the purse" against agencies that this administration is trying to throttle to death anyway.

First of all, these "bomb-thrower" appointees must be literally called to task. They may cackle with glee now that they hold the reins of their most hated enemies, but the oversight capacity of Congress must now hold them to executing the duties of their new offices faithfully, completely, and accurately. As such, they must be forced to actually perform their hated jobs correctly, or face indictment for abandoning their job responsibilities. For in order to act on their obvious intent they would have to break actual laws, either by neglecting their specified duties or by hiding or falsifying information gathered by their agency. As such, the forthcoming congressional hearings into wiretapping and manipulated intelligence will prove to be only the tip of a vast bureaucratic iceberg of malfeasance within nearly every government agency. I find it difficult to believe that such persons have been doing their jobs properly, given that they loathe those jobs as a matter of philosophical and/or religious dogma.

Now that we have a Congress prepared to actually exercize the oversight responsibility delegated to it by the Constitution, two years saturated with scandals as yet unknown are simply inevitable. Don't say you weren't warned. The only way we've avoided hearing about what's been crawling around under these rocks so far has been to avoid looking under rocks. But hopefully with enough such hearings, those who campaign against government agencies will become considerably more hesitant in the future to apply for or to accept positions running those agencies. If forced to actually do their jobs, they would either have to become what they purport to hate or reverse their stated convictions entirely.

In the long run, it is high time that those of us to the left of the new center took the time to make the case for government. If these Ayn Rand conservatives would characterize us as Socialists (or even Communists) merely for suggesting that certain functions of government are useful and necessary in order to define the limits and bounds within which individual enterprise may best flourish, then it is far more powerful to make the argument that their extremist call for no government (except for the military) leads ultimately to pure economic anarchy under the rule of a fascist junta. Just look at any third-world banana republic for the inevitable end result of their philosophy: the military is 90% of government, a handful of people have all the wealth, all infrastructure is privatized (that is, nonexistent) and the middle class has been completely eroded, leaving behind nothing but a vast - er, "affordable labor market" to be either exploited or discarded by the aforementioned wealthy. There are many examples of such economic wastelands available for comparison today. Each constitutes the antithesis of everything that America stands for.

And don't let the neocons try to tell you that this is not truly their aim. The fact that they haven't thought out the end result of their political dogma does not mean that they can disavow it so easily. Everything may be mere fun and games when it's all just rhetoric, but now that they have been stupid and insane enough to turn it all into policy, the real results of this creed are becoming clear to the electorate. If we could have a proper discussion of which functions of government should be exercized to what degree, then that would be sane. But to always call for "smaller government" regardless of the current actual size of the government, and regardless of its current activities or our current needs, constitutes merely a thinly veiled call for precisely such a form of pure economic anarchy. And even that thin veil is rapidly dropping.

But let's allow the fascists and the communists to fight out their extremist philosophies in other countries than ours. Among other things, America was supposed to be the land of the sane. Anybody who tries to tell you that we should be completely to either side of any philosophical scale merely in order to fulfill the purity of their vision is a raving lunatic and needs to be called so immediately whenever they dare open their bleating yap. It's time that we brought a new sense of shame to those who would dare to make a virtue out of dereliction of duty. That is not the American way, and these madmen are no patriots.