Do we love to hate insurers?

Susanp
San francisco, ca

While everyone likes to blame the insurers, it is a business and actually serves a purpose. They should not be allowed, and don't, to make huge profits (unlike the pharmaceutical industry). Many years ago, health insurance just covered hospital as that was considered catastrophic. The smart doctors started admitting patients for routine physicals - patients loved it as they didn't have to pay and the doctors could charge more. Insurers got smart and started coverage outpatient. So there is a delicate balance that works to keep things in check.

I admit the insurers want to make a modest profit. If they are making too big a profit why wouldn't some one come in and undercut them. Everyone cites 45,000/year die from being uninsured. However, over 200,000 die from medical errors - too much treatment.

Several years ago insurers weren't covering a chemo treatment but lost a multi-million dollar suit so started covering it. Later found out that the studies were falsified, this treatment was grueling and also killed people - but the docs and hosps were making huge profits on it. Again, a delicate balance.

Insurance companies aren't the good guys, but they aren't the bad guys either. The examples above show how providers game the system - the federal gov't doesn't have the incentive to check that - just look at Medicare.

The health care law should have been about more affordable care first - which it does nothing to control. Like a car manufacturer can't hold prices down when the price of tires and steel goes up, the insurers can't hold prices down as more and more is covered and the pharmas and providers are allowed to raise prices.


Joel L. Friedlander
Plainview, New York

There is no way that the insurance companies can charge enough premium to cover, say, a juvenile hemophiliac who requires $1,000.00 in medication every day. There are numerous other diseases that are too costly to cover, and requiring everyone to buy insurance isn't going to cover it. That is, if the insurance companies are going to make enough money to really profit from the business. Insurance companies aren't charities and so they cannot be expected to provide money for medical care if they cannot earn money for their workers. The answer is that the plan is going to result in the end of insurance and ultimately in National Health Care. Only the government can afford to cover a people who have eaten themselves into obesity and late onset diabetes, earlier and earlier cardiac problems, and ever increasing debilitating illnesses. Only National Health Care will work, and it will require that the fat, sloppy, uncontrolled people of this country take themselves in hand and work to better their own physical condition.

There was a story a few years ago about a tribe of Native Americans, Indians that is, who discovered that once they had taken on the White Man's ways they had a massive incidence of heart disease and diabetes. It was because their bodies required lots of physical exercise because of centuries of living on the edge. What they did was to institute a tribal exercise program for everyone in the tribe. The result was that their heart conditions improved and their incidence of diabetes decreased. They were an intelligent people and we can learn from them. We too, all of us, require exercise, since none of us comes from a past where physical labor was absent. We can improve our physical condition and reduce the costs of health care.

Also, since 80% of medicare monies are spent in the last few months of life, it is perhaps time for us to look into our own souls and when we reach the end, admit that we cannot live forever. I wonder if we could ever do that. Is life so sweet as to be purchased at the cost of chains and slavery for our progeny?


jeff f
charlestown, MA

Most ignore the fact that the availability of quality medical professionals (i.e. doctors), not the availability of insurance, will ultimately determine the availability and adequacy of health care. What good is the insurance if the internist or specialist is not accepting new patients? What good is insurance that will pay for a joint replacement or open heart surgery, etc. if there is no board certified surgeon within hundreds of miles and/or you cannot get an appointment with the surgeon for 6 months or more? As one surgeon and one expert in the financial end of healthcare recently told me, in due course we'll be going to India or to new surgical centers that will be set up in the Caribbean, and many will continue to be unable to get top-notch healthcare in the US if for no other reason than that THERE WILL NOT BE ENOUGH DOCTORS. We will then discover it's not about paying for healthcare, it's about demand exceeding supply (old-fashioned market economics).

about the psychology of taxes

pdxtran
Minneapolis

Naturally, the top 1% are advocating the interests of their own class, sometimes ridiculously so. I'll never forget the time a woman wrote to the (Portland) Oregonian, saying, "I pay $100,000 a year in income taxes, but I'm not rich..."

What is more puzzling and infuriating is the stubbornness of people who are not rich, who are downright poor in some cases, arguing for special privileges for the top income levels.

When I read the comments in the online edition of my local newspaper, I see a subset of readers who seem to have Stockholm syndrome in connection with the rich. Their attitude typifies the saying, "Republicans think that the rich don't have enough money and poor people have too much." That is, they insist on the need for tax cuts for the super-rich and express clear disdain, even hatred, for the poor.

Judging from the nearly universal semi-literacy of their writings, I would guess that the annual incomes of these writers are closer to $25,000 than to $250,000, and so I have wondered about the mindset that underlies their opinions.

The first ingredient in that mindset is the right-wing media, not only Fox News and AM radio, but magazines, public access television, and megachurches that have mysteriously sprung up full grown in America's suburbs to preach a "gospel" that owes more to the Republican Party platform than to the words of Jesus. It's possible to live in a total information environment that not only pushes right-wing politics 24/7 but also tells its audience that other sources of information are "biased."

The second ingredient in this mindset is continual exposure to entertainment media that present glamorous, fantasy lifestyles instead of ordinary people. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is one of the most obvious examples, but we can also note the absence of working class or even typical middle class people in network dramas and comedies. This is in contrast to what one sees on foreign television programs, namely, ordinary-looking characters who live the same unglamorous lives that their real-life counterparts would.

American culture, especially commercial culture, plays a role, too. From childhood, we are taught "work hard and you'll get ahead," with "ahead" meaning "financially secure." This conditioning makes it easy for Americans to believe that all wealthy people acquired their wealth through hard work (as opposed to inheriting it or playing financial games while seated at a computer) while all poor people are lazy.

A bit of fear may be involved as well. Someone whose livelihood is somehow dependent on investments or purchases by the super-wealthy may worry that a few hundred or a few thousand extra dollars in taxes will discourage multimillionaires and billionaires from investing and spending.

They may not know enough about accounting to realize that businesses pay income tax on profits, not on total income. As such, they may be susceptible to right-wing propagandists who say that high income taxes cause businesses to fail or that low or non-existent income taxes will cause businesses to step up hiring, even in the absence of customers.

Finally, I believe that a bit of magical thinking is involved. When a person of modest means promotes the interests of people who make as much in a year as the typical American will make in a lifetime, I see someone who is thinking, "Maybe if I praise rich people and despise poor people enough, God will see that I deserve to be rich--or that I at least deserve not to fall into poverty."

Taken together, these factors may explain why the whining of the super-rich about a negligible tax increase resonates so strongly with Americans who will never have to pay it.

don't we all love goldman?

Justin Lin
Beijing

I would like to point out that Goldman has been at the heart of every scam running on Wall Street.
1. Sitting in at the table in September 2008 on the AIG deal (heck, their use of AIG because the regular monolines wouldn’t touch their dreck) and then having Geithner sign off on payouts to Goldman among others at par in November 2008

2. Their involvement in the dark pools (Sigma X is the biggest player in them and guess who owns it?)

3. The use of computer frontrunning

4. The use of "huddles" to reward some customers and stiff others

5. Manipulation of oil markets (through its subsidiary J. Aron, and you wondered why gas was selling at around $3 a gallon in a recession)

6. Its involvement in the Greek sovereign debt crisis

7. Its revolving door penetration and control of both the Fed and Treasury (Remember how Hank Paulson former chairman and CEO of Goldman was Treasury Secretary when everything hit the fan, or how he put his mini-me Kashkari a 30 something Goldman exec who had followed him to Treasury in to head the TARP? Robert Rubin ring any bells? The list of the Goldman’s "public service" is long. Thank goodness, that’s all over. Oh wait, William Dudley Goldman’s former chief economist is the current president of the NY Fed and Mark Patterson who also is a Goldman alum is Timmy’s minder chief of staff)

8. Its manipulation of stock markets by trading on its own account (acting like its own hedge fund) and also through its participation in the NYSE’s Supplemental Liquidity Provider program (So you wondered how those sudden late in the day "rallies" happened. Some exchanges are so effectively controlled that only an idiot like a pension fund manager would be stupid enough to invest in them)

9. And as long as we are on the subject of exchanges, the one that ICE has set up to handle derivatives is owned by Goldman and other big players.

10. Its history of stiffing investors by awarding employees monster size bonuses.

11. And of course it was Hank Paulson back in April 2004 who persuaded SEC head Christopher Cox to remove leverage limits (through elimination of the net capital rule, and we know how that turned out)

12. After Lehman blew up on September 15, 2008, Goldman and Morgan Stanley got their applications insta-approved just 6 days later on the 21st to become bankholding companies. This gave Goldman access to fat government credit lines and allowed them to pick up where they had left off.

13. However, when it became apparent that being a bankholding company might lead to some government oversight, Goldman changed its status yet again and became a financial holding company

14. Then of course we have the current fraud charges based on Goldman loading a CDO with dreck, selling CDS on it through ACA to John Paulson et al and then selling the toxic CDO to sophisticated investors, also known as fund managers and foreign banks, or rubes for short

15. Finally, there has been Goldman’s successful push with other big financial players against any meaningful financial reform. Some have said that the Goldman charges were a means to pre-empt a Wall Street effort to block reform. What this ignores is that both the Frank and Dodd bills are already empty vessels. Watching Democrats beat their breasts and accuse Republicans of being in bed with Wall Street is the kind of humorous hypocrisy and kabuki that many of us got used to in the healthcare debate or before that with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In any case, this is a list I made pretty much on the fly. Its purpose is to remind myself as much as anyone why enterprises like Goldman Sachs should not exist. They serve no useful social or market function. Not only do they not create wealth, they lead to great wealth destruction. They are completely and totally unreformable. We look at the bonuses and say that it only took them a year to go back to their old ways. The truth is that Goldman never gave up its ways. It found a new patsy, the US taxpayer, within days of the meltdown and the crony casino capitalist band played on.

Walt & Obama

Trapped
Stephen M. Walt

Over the past twenty months, progressives, realists, and even some sensible conservatives have been disappointed by various aspects of the Obama administration's foreign and defense policy. Convinced that his election would mark a dramatic departure from the Bush administration's many missteps, they have been surprised and dismayed by Obama's increased reliance on drone attacks in Pakistan and elsewhere, his decisions to escalate the war in Afghanistan (not just once but twice), the retreat on Guantanamo, the Justice Department's use of dubious secrecy laws to shield torturers and deny victims the ability to sue them, the slow-motion reassessment of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the timid retreat from the lofty principles enunciated in his 2009 Cairo speech, and the unwillingness to consider anything more than trivial reductions in the bloated national security apparatus.
I share many of these concerns, but I don't really blame Obama. The buck may stop in the Oval Office, but it's not like he can simply wave a magic wand (or give another speech) and get the rest of the government to fall into line. Instead, the fact that U.S. foreign and defense policy hasn't changed very much reflects the powerful structural forces that inhibit any president's freedom of action. Or to put it more simply: he's trapped. Even if Obama wanted to chart a fundamentally different course (and I'm not at all sure that he does), he wouldn't be able to pull it off.
The first obstacle is America's current global position. Over the past sixty years, the United States built up a vast array of global military facilities, security partnerships, and overseas commitments. In the process, the United States ended up with the responsibility of providing a lot of collective goods (freedom of the seas, regional stability in Europe and Asia, security of global oil supplies, etc.) and it also ended up with a flock of client states who depend on us for various forms of economic, military, and diplomatic support.
These arrangements arose primarily due to the Cold War, but instead of dismantling them when the Cold War ended and returning to a more sensible and restrained grand strategy, the United States instead chose to expand its global responsibilities even further. This was partly because we didn't foresee any real opposition: as George H. W. Bush put it, we found ourselves "at the pinnacle of power, with the rarest opportunity to reshape the world." Hubris played a role too: U.S. leaders convinced themselves that we had the will and the skill to manage vast areas of the globe. Or as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously put it, the United States was the "indispensable nation" and that the U.S. "sees further than other countries into the future." And it was also because we thought that we could embed other countries into a set of rules and institutions that were largely of U.S. design. As Richard Haass, former director of policy planning and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, declared in 2002, the goal was to integrate other countries "into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values and thereby promote peace, prosperity, and justice."
So the United States expanded NATO deep into eastern Europe, adopted the foolish strategy of "dual containment" in the Persian Gulf, invaded Iraq in 2003 in a misguided attempt to transform the Middle East by force, and then got itself bogged down in a costly and ill-conceived effort at nation-building in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces remain deeply engaged on every continent, and as the Washington Post recently documented, the "war on terror" has led to a vast expansion in secret intelligence activities -- much of it conducted by a shadowy network of private contractors -- the scope of which is not even fully understood by the civilians who are allegedly in charge.
It is increasingly obvious that the United States has taken on a set of missions that it is not very good at, and that it cannot afford to continue without hollowing out its power here at home. It's also likely that some of these commitments are eventually going to go south (i.e., whenever we are propping up governments that lack popular support or that are pursuing policies that the rest of the world regards as wrong). The problem Obama faces, however, is that it would be neither easy nor cost-free to liquidate these commitments quickly. This is essentially a variation of the familiar "hegemon's dilemma": having occupied a position of primacy and taken on a vast array of global responsibilities, trying to disengage from them is like dismounting from a tiger. Once you begin to disengage, you may invite some short-term instability that actually makes things look worse. Moreover, any attempt to shift U.S. burdens onto others or to make significant cuts in our defense expenditures is bound to invite fierce opposition from the GOP, who would be quick to paint Obama as a cowardly or feckless appeaser. Instead of a long-overdue rethinking of U.S. strategy, therefore, we have a continuation of the status quo and an attempt to muddle through with our fingers firmly crossed.
The second impediment to change is the foreign policy establishment itself. As I've discussed before, the balance of political power inside Washington is heavily weighted towards the energetic use of American power -- and especially military power -- in virtually every corner of the world. Although think-tank denizens at Brookings, AEI, Heritage, and the Council on Foreign Relations sometimes disagree about specific policy initiatives, the vast majority are enthusiastic defenders of America's dominant global role. Hardly anyone at these institutions strays outside a rather narrow spectrum of thought, or questions the inherent legitimacy of the United States intervening just about anywhere it wants, even if the predictable results are the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.
For the most part, debates within mainstream foreign policy circles run the gamut from A to B, from neoconservativism at one end and hawkish liberal interventionism at the other. As I said a few years ago, if neocons are essentially liberals on steroids, then most liberal internationalists are just kinder, gentler neocons. They agree on the virtues of American primacy, the need to prevent WMD from spreading (while keeping most of our own), the desirability of spreading democracy nearly everywhere, and the value of nearly all of the United States' current alliances. The only issue where neocons and liberals part company is the role of global institutions (neocons see them as dangerous constraints on U.S. autonomy, while liberals see them as useful supplements to American power). Given this basically bipartisan consensus, it is hardly surprising that most of the senior officials in Obama's foreign policy team were open supporters of the Iraq War, as well as steadfast believers in the United States right to intervene wherever and however it sees fit.
Ambitious foreign policy wonks understand that straying outside that comfortable consensus isn't going to advance their careers. That is why even sensible moderates have to polish their hawkish credentials if they want to be taken seriously, and even experienced pillars of the establishment are not immune from this same tendency. For example, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, has admitted that he supported the Iraq War in 2003 in part to maintain his own bona fides within the establishment. In his words, "my initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility" (emphasis added). And given that Gelb acted this way even though he was on the brink of retirement, you can imagine how more powerful this incentive is for someone starting out their career.
Finally, Obama clearly understands that the U.S. military has become a very powerful institution in American society, and that he doesn't have the personal background or clout to take them on directly. This situation helps us understand why he's gone slow on DADT, why he couldn't say no to their requests for more troops in Afghanistan, and why the Pentagon budget will continue to rise despite our massive budget woes.
In short, even if Barack Obama wanted to do many of the things that progressives might want, he would face enormous opposition from the uniformed services, the defense corporations who subsidize those conservative think tanks, the array of special interest groups pushing their own particular foreign policy projects, and the legion of hawkish pundits at Fox News, the Weekly Standard, and AM talk radio.
And let's not forget the true wing-nut elements in the American body politic. When both the secretary of Defense and our commanding general in Afghanistan have to waste precious time telling some obscure bigot in Florida that burning the Koran will put U.S. soldiers at greater risk, you know that the people who are allegedly running the country don't have much latitude to explore genuine alternatives.
In short, if you're disappointed that Barack Obama didn't live up to your expectations, you ought to go a bit easier on the poor guy. He can tinker at the margins, and he can probably resist the bad advice of those who'd like to get us into a few more wars (e.g., Iran), but he's not in a position to engineer a more thorough reassessment of our global strategy. Change will eventually come -- especially if the U.S. economy doesn't turn around and major deficits persist -- but it will be a slow and grinding process and an awful lot of money and more than a few lives will get wasted before we get there.
But don't lose hope entirely. As I often remind myself, it could have been a lot worse.

r we fcuk-ed?

Jeremy Horne, Ph.D.
Alamogordo, NM

"President Obama and the Democrats failed to seize the moment...". They didn't? Why am I not surprised? There are two major issues to ponder, here.

First is the very viability of the U.S. corporatist system, itself. Remember that Italian Fascism was a response to a collapsing capitalism; it was a "pragmatic" system that, even with a basic philosophy, was an experiment. Mussolini, himself, wrote that fascists must watch the "Roosevelt experiment" closely. A coherent argument can be made that what F.D.R. did, as necessary as it was, also was an fascist experiment, albeit with an American twist. Robert Gibbs hops about attempting to reach for the butterflies of employment and financial stability, but we should look at how rotten to the core is the corporatist platform on which he stands. U.S. corporatism no longer is sustainable, as it has exported its productive base in the form of outsourcing and has allowed parasitic wealth ("investments", speculation, "derivatives", and the like) to become the foundation of the value of negotiable instruments (including money). As the velocity of capital slows down, no productive engine can start up to generate wealth based on labor power. The house of cards now is collapsing, and a massive public works program, while critically necessary, will not save corporatism in the long run. We have to search for a political economic alternative that is more steady state, cooperatively based, and not dependent just on upon production. As a start, we need to return to the labor theory of value.

Second, people in the U.S. seem to be in a tunnel when it comes to political parties. In logic, we call it "false dilemma", a fallacy as old as the hills. You only can do A or do B. Both parties can look for solutions only within their narrow corporatist ideological (system of ideas not subject to question) framework. Of course, neither party can be expected to break out of the mold, offering nationalization of major industries and banks, socialization of medicine, massive public works projects even larger than those vetted by FDR, or major support for labor organizations and workers' democracy. Systems that remain viable are the ones that can adapt, and this one is not doing well; it is constricted by an ideology of corporatism just as severely as was the former U.S.S.R constricted with its version of communism. Until people start thinking critically and philosophically, at the same time getting educated, we will continue to rattle down the road that other degenerating empires have taken.


Andrew
Colesville, MD

The housing-financial crisis started in 2007 and is ongoing and the real reason has always been lack of investment outlets due to relative overproduction and overcapacity of utilization of means of production. Overproduction is due to lack of effective demand that was the result of stagnated wage levels for the past four decades. Stagnated wage levels created economic stagnation. In addition, the stagnated real economy discouraged investment in real or production economic sector and diverted funds or profits to the non-real or fictitious economy, namely the sector of monopoly finance capital, which manipulates money but does not produce real value for the economy, as we know it. Finance capitalists can mutually redistribute money capitals by changing hands among themselves. In this way, they do not hire workers to produce commodity, so they do not help workers create any value for the society. Unemployment keeps rising with no effective means to reverse the trend.

Because the finance capitalists pass over the labor power or the value creator, their “investment” is not constrained by lack of investment outlets in real economy. The monopoly finance capital makes a lot more money than the real sector. Their profits transferred from the production sector have skyrocketed and weighed in an ever-larger proportion of the G.D.P.

Money capital in the cash form rises to $1.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2010 for the production sector and that for the finance sector may be comparable if not larger. The unduly large combined amount of idled cash waiting for borrowers to take actions lowers down the interest rate. Savers suffer a great deal whereas borrowers including speculators on capital markets gain handsomely. The Federal Reserve has become an Automatic Transaction Machine for the finance capital, which can borrow at almost zero interest rate and turn around making an obscene fortune effortlessly. Under such a thriving way of making easy money, who is going to be interested in hiring workers for production given uncertain return for investment?

President Obama and the Democrats failed to seize the moment on the economy almost two years ago because of the formation of the axis of Geithner-Summers-Bernanke who represent Wall Street interests and care for the most part the perverse interests of monopoly finance capital. This evil axis, while issuing a license to steal to the finance capital, the country is paying the price for Obama, Democrats and Republican’s spinelessness.

The country is in a state of decline because the monopoly finance capital has usurped the power of the nation-state and governments.

Once the monopoly finance capital has grown to such a big size that their influences have been as large as to enable private nations inside a public nation-state, no regulation and reform will change their business-as- usual nature based on willful and instinctive capital accumulation that do great harm to society. The leopard cannot change his spots, no matter how daring one tries.

There are many reasons why we have to transform the monopoly economy into a public-owned people’s economy. The most important two of them are:
1. Modern-day industries such as petroleum do not serve the society as before; they actually serve the monopoly finance capital for most of their purposes. Industrial capital becomes subservient to the finance capital. Since the monopoly finance capital is the sole owner of the government and of the nation-state, the consumption market of people loses their control power of the economy out to the finance monopoly.
2. Capital and environmental calamity rescue and ecological sustainability are mutually antagonistic. Development of monopoly capitalism means unsustainable growth and any sustainable green energy development policy will be impossible under the for-private-profit system unless people concede major portion of their real income to the monopoly capital.
The current system is an obstacle to the progresses of the society and barrier to the production force. Its political design is so woefully out-of-date that reform alone is of no use to societal survival, because the economic infrastructure or the for-private-profit social relation of production is hopeless anathematic to the needs of people and nature.

We need a direct democratic system replacing the current inept faux democratic system to fight now seemingly unbeatable foe of nationalization.

Loosers: The Dems or Us?

Robert Henry Eller
Milan, Italy

'... whether “he understands the problems of people like you.”'

Apparently, not.

President Obama's one big mistake: He has never understood why people voted for him. And if he did understand why people had voted for him, he ignored it. He thought he knew better than his true constituents; He was, I hate to say, arrogant.

The people who voted for him did want him to change things, to save them. But as desperate as they were for bottom up help (health care reform, economic stimulus), what they truly wanted to see was top down change. In fact, they saw electing President Obama as the first evidence that they might get top down change. If they had seen real evidence that Obama, and the Democrats, were going to end business-as-usual, or at least fight tooth-and-nail to end business as usual, in Washington, on Wall Street, I believe the President's supporters would have kept faith. His supporters understood the depths of the problems, and how long it would take to solve them. Why else did he think they voted for him in the first place?

Obama's supporters understood that we'd gotten to where we were because of the ways things were done. We could not ameliorate the effects, and ignore the causes. The last thing the President should have been worrying about was bi-partisanship and reconciliation. He should have set out immediately to do his voters bidding. He should have left it to the Republicans themselves, to decide whether they wanted to be bi-partisan or conciliate. It is for the losers to sue for peace, not for the winners.

The corollary: He apparently never understood that the people who voted against him did not simply conclude that he was the second best choice. After eight years of Bush-Cheney-Rove and the Republicans, after Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, the economic and financial meltdown, anybody who would vote for McCain-Palin and the Republicans was not going to vote for Barack Hussein Obama under any circumstances, or against any other candidate, period. And they were not going to give him the benefit of the doubt if he was elected, by any majority however clear.

President Obama never understood that his election was only the first battle, fortunately and expensively won, at the beginning of a war. It was not the battle that ended the war. But that is how he apparently saw it, as the end of the war. Why else would he have allowed the DNC and Rahm Emanuel to co-opt, de-claw and de-fang his peerless and unprecedented grass roots campaign legions?

Obama's supporters were, largely, equally adamant that, after the primaries, he was not the better choice. He was the only choice. The President, the leader, ironically never understood, or felt, what his troops, knew: They were at war.

I myself did not contribute every dollar I could spare, and more than I could afford, just because I thought Obama would make a better President than McCain. I gave as though my country was at war. McCain and the Republicans were not just incompetent, not just a disaster. They were indeed the enemy.

The only possible way President Obama, and the Democrats, might now recover, starting today, and assuming he can recognize, and acknowledge, these strategic mistakes, is to convince the people who supported him that he understands he was wrong and why. He could fire Summers and Geitner. He could encourage Emanuel to run for Mayor of Chicago. He could empower Elizabeth Warren. He could attack the Republicans as he should. He could get the Attorney General to start investigating Cheney. He could become a real war President, in the only war the US is currently fighting whose outcome matters for America: the war the army of his voters thought he was leading us to fight.

I know I'm probably just dreaming. But this is the dream the majority of us had almost two years ago this November. The dream we thought had come true. And it's still the only dream I'm willing to fight for. If President Obama can convince enough of us that he believes in this dream, that he will fight for this dream, then perhaps he can regain the support of those of us who once thought he understood us.

Fred Drumlevitch
Tucson, Arizona

This November, I will hold my nose and vote for all Democrats --- not because they deserve my vote, but simply because the alternative is so much worse, an incoherent mob of apologists for personal selfishness and the rich manipulators who, despite their "patriotic" camouflage, are actually working against the greater interests of the nation.

The Democratic Party as a whole, and most Democratic politicians as individuals, should be embarrassed by the way in which they have in so many policy matters managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They were elected in a time of crisis to pass and implement bold transformative measures, to be done in the spirit of Great Depression progressivism. They haven't delivered even one-tenth of what they should have. It will be up to historians to definitively determine whether that was due to political inexperience, wishful thinking, a deficit of courage, incompetence, or the corrupting influence of campaign donations. Most likely, it was all of the above, and more.

I will hold my nose as I vote for Democrats this election cycle, and give them one more chance to redeem themselves. If no significant improvement in Democratic policy stands occurs during the next two years, in 2012 I will support a new progressive party that is bound to emerge from the probable ashes of the current Democratic one.

Marie Burns
Fort Myers, Florida

Yes to all that. But there are other shadows hanging over the President, shadows of his own making. One is Afghanistan. Another is the President's continuation of Bush secrecy policies & his massive cover-up of Bush Administration wrongdoing. He won a big one in court on the latter this week.

An actual liberal, like me, wants to see Obama come out strongly for returning Americans to work & protecting all of us from special interests. So of course if he follows your playscript, I'll be glad of it. But I'm not sure how much Obama's saying the right -- and obvious -- thing on socioeconomic issues would drive up my enthusiasm quotient. I still know there are Americans & Afghans dying for Hamid Karzai.

Maybe that doesn't matter. I'm going to vote, & Republican obstructionists have forced me to vote Democratic all the way, even when the Democrat might not be the better candidate. A Floridian, I haven't made up my mind yet on Meek-Crist as to who is the better candidate, but be assured Kendrick Meek, the Democrat, has my vote. He can thank Mitch McConnell for that.

It's the independents Obama must reach. Everyone, including me, calls them independents, but that's really a nice name for clueless & distracted. President Obama can certainly see to it that they forget all about the war & secret renditions & Bush's bad boys. He just has to Keep It Simple, Stupid, when he explains that he cares about Middle America's future & John Boehner & Mitch McConnell only care about their own.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com


Sheri
TN

Not in a million years would I thought I'd utter the following phrase, but NOW is the time for Americans to "stay the course."

Obama will NOT be able to right thirty-year-old wrongs even as a two-term president; no one could. I voted for him not because I thought he was a miracle worker, but because I was confident in the groundwork he promised - and I still am.

Come on, liberals, enough with the "this isn't the change I voted for" whining. What you voted for was a corrective, and it has been presented, and well. The fruits of it are yet to come, but they won't do so if all you do is complain. Obama can't do it alone, nor should he.

So, liberals, GET UP, GO OUT, AND HELP IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN - because that is where the hope and change will come from: us.


Barbara Taylor
Charlotte, NC

Yes, it's long past time for Obama to clear up the confusion as to which side he is on.

FDR, he isn't. But maybe he can redeem himself as something less than another corporate-politician-for-hire if he keeps up the tough rhetoric but backs it up with action. Talk is cheap. We don't care what he says or even thinks, because we believed in that in 2008 and look what it got us. The only thing that will get us behind him again is action, tough action with real leadership in getting things done.

If he sits in the background and delegates everything to Pelosi and Reid while it falls apart, whines, and says it's hard, like he did with health care and other initiatives, we'll give up on him. But if he really tries and fails to move a more middle-class oriented agenda in the face of Republican obstructionism, we'll stay with him as long as he fights the good fight.


Tim Kane
Mesa, Arizona

Obama can't credibly speak out on behalf of the middle class at this late date, if ever, to minimize the outcome of the coming elections.

The fact is, we've all noticed Obama's considerable talents. The fact is, he's only exercised them with vigor when his own employment scenario was in question.

We all expected Obama to co-opt FDR. The Republican Party hasn't changed in over 80 years and the current depression was born on the backs of the same Republican party, exercising policies that caused the same problem, concentration of wealth, leading to the same outcome then and now. It's all the same, except the script was already laid out, thankfully, by Roosevelt.

The fact is, after Obama won the election, with his OWN EMPLOYMENT SECURED, he was happy to 'phone it in' for 'half loaf' measures. Specifically: he (easily) foresee-ably accepted a stimulus that was inadequate, by at least a third, and was happy to throw public option under the bus (after talking Democrats into trading down to it from single payer).

In short Obama's lack of vigor on behalf of the middle class is the biggest political disappointment since the Supreme Court appointed George Bush president.

About keeping his job, it is painfully obvious, Obama cares. About helping the middle class, Obama can't get invigorated.

What is motivating Obama now is the threat of a Republican congress, with subpoena power, plus the power to impeach. In that light, Obama's belated, most craven populism, is a gross and rank embarrassment.

Obama reminds me of a high school wannabe - from an ordinary background, but who wants to be in with the cool kids, or in his case, the BigMoney elite types. As a result he's been friendly to their asperations, in many cases surrendering to them, only to find out that he'll never be accepted. I'm sure the rejection stings.

So, it's back to the green that he's come from. Ordinarily, we would reject him for a true advocate. But now, we are desperate and we have two more years before we can exercise any choice at all - so we are stuck with him for the indefinite future.

Obama, therefore, has an opportunity to earn his way into the favor of the middle class. But it will take two years of intense advocacy on behalf of the populism and middle class for it to look believable and that he means it.

More likely, two weeks after the coming election, come what may, Obama will go back to half loaves and to phoning it in.

The Obama administration is the biggest public disappointment I've ever experienced in my entire, half century'd, life - and by an enormous margin.

I expected George Bush to be a massive catastrophe, and he lived up to that. I'm not sure which is the bigger catastrophe: the failure of the Bush administration or the failure of the Obama administration to reverse course.

One thing is certain, if our political system is incapable of solving our growing list of catastrophic problems, because our richest citizens and our elites won't allow for it, this nation will collapse at a rate that will stun the entire world.

It is also a tragedy that we have a wealthy upper class that is willing to trash the nation. Not just willing, but willing to pay massive amounts of money, build giant media empires, endow rogue religions and preachers, to see that its done.

In normal times Obama would be a decent president. These aren't normal times.

In these times, Obama is merely inadequate.

Beguiling considering the talent he's demonstrated in the past.


Cdr. John Newlin
Vista, Calif.

Another very revealing statistic that the President might put in his quiver is the chart featured on Friday's Rachel Maddow show. That chart showed income growth rates from 1948 to 2005 with a vertical axis of percentile income and a horizontal axis of income growth rates. The growth rates under Republican Presidents and Democratic presidents were displayed by red and blue bars respectively. The chart dramatically shows that in every Republican presidency, income growth rate was significantly less than in yeas of Democratic presidencies. The president ought to haul out that chart everywhere he goes. It's a real windjammer to the breadbasket of supply side Republicans.

Another chart that ought to be jammed down the Plutocrat's throats is the pie chart that depicts the amount of income growth for various groups over the period from 1979 to 2007. This chart shows that the growth for the top 10% of income earners was a wopping 63.7%! How did the bottom 90% do over the same period? A pathetic 36.3%. As Edith Ann was wont to say, "And that's the truth."


Jake Wagner
Santa Barbara, CA

Perhaps no more telling indictment of Obama's priorities is revealed in the choices his Justice Department has made in which legal cases to prosecute.

We witnessed a CEO Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers walking away with compensation of about a half billion dollars in the decade leading up to the bankruptcy of his company. One of the architects of the exotic CDO's that helped wipe out trillions of US wealth, he systematically misled the stockholders of his company and government regulators about the economic health of his company. It is still not clear what his role was in the infamous Repo 105 accounting gimmicks, but here there is at least the appearance of systematic criminal fraud.

Yet Richard Fuld has yet to be indicted for any criminal activity.

Instead, Obama's Justice Department goes after an admittedly flawed attempt by Arizona's government to deal with one of the federal government's failures, the inability to enforce US border laws regarding immigration. It has been estimated that US population growth of .9% per year during the past decade is largely attributable to illegal immigration and the higher fertility of illegal immigrants who gain access to US welfare benefits through their children, who automatically become US citizens.

That population growth has added 28 million new US residents in the last decade or 230,000 new residents each month. Compare that with the number of new jobs the US economy is producing each month!

Consider the message Obama sends to the unskilled or semiskilled workers who might make up a substantial portion of his base: "I won't prosecute the Wall Street titans that defrauded your pension funds, but I will do everything in my power to block efforts of a governor to enforce the federal immigration laws that should protect your jobs." Then you can perhaps understand why so many of the unwashed working class gravitate to something other than Obama.


Todd Fox
Connecticut

The other night at a country fair I spoke with a woman who had just lost her job with the town. She said "I'll just get another one—when I'm ready." After looking myself, for nearly two years, I wondered if this would be easier said than done—especially since we are both women "of a certain age". (Actually I think we might be well past that rather nebulous age.) She said "Oh, I've already been offered a job, but I turned it down. The benefits weren't as good as the ones I had. So why should I take it when I have 99 weeks of unemployment coming to me?" Coming to me. That's how she viewed it—not as a handout but as something coming to her.
Then there are people like my husband—a hero as far as I'm concerned. He's working for 1/3 of his former salary, and still putting in the exact same effort—out of a sense of responsibility to "get the job done" and a strong work ethic.
The Democrats would have us believe that everyone who is taking "extended unemployment" benefits is in dire straits and desperately looking for a job—any job. The Republicans would have us believe that they are all free-loaders. Somewhere between the two lies the truth.
I think that's the problem: the truth lies in between the politics and the politicians. The Republicans would have us believe that the founding fathers are rolling in their graves and that the Democrats are know-nothing commie bastids. The Democrats describe the tea-party as uneducated "old people" who are under a spell woven by FOX. Both sides do not listen to one another—even though there is truth and wisdom coming from the sane people in either party.
Obama campaigned as someone who could bring us all back together, but sadly, he's playing the divisiveness game as much as all the others. If there is ONE thing I wish I would see him do, it would be to stop the divisiveness, stop the class warfare, stop the inflammatory rhetoric about the wealthy, and stop blaming his predecessor.
Tell us what YOU can do now, Mr. Obama. Please, please set an example of compassionate listening and understanding. In short—lead.


Andrew
Colesville, MD

I do not think Obama can emulate F.D.R.

His political environment is worse than F.D.R’s. The capitalist class has entered its zenith of bourgeois power dictatorship over the working people for the past three decades. They have easily quelled any nascent political progressiveness, let alone shifting away from far rightist policies. Weak working class power gives rise to weak policy changing possibility. This is why Obama gave up meaningful changes for people’s betterment for more than one and half years since he took the office of presidency.

As Wall Street has claimed supreme politico-economic power of the capitalist orders, even smidgen trivial matters have to get Wall Street’s approval. People have severely criticized the Wall Street axis of Greithner-Summers-Bernanke for malfeasance and have requested Obama to break up the axis and dismiss them but Obama refused to do so for the power that hijacked the government is Wall Street or the monopoly finance capital.

F.D.R came from a wealthy aristocratic family and he had no need to be avid of the capitalists’ rightist favor for money and connections. He could afford to declare that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” Obama’s family origin is completely different. His family was of moderate means. His official career and personal advancement have usually under the rich capitalists thumb. F.D.R could not careless about of the hatred of his enemies but Obama cannot afford to neglect the hatred of his. Because, in such a deeply commodified society, even the highest officer in the country has to obey rules of selling and buying, wheeling and dealing, set up by the top-drawers to whom one would have to be much obliged, especially if one is timorous and giddily tending to blandish those on top of social and official ladders.

The U.S. electoral democratic system has shown its fatal drawbacks from the Reagan era to the present. Democracy has become timocracy that the electorates are so timorous and bereft after losing control that they literally hold power for only one day annually and give the rest to capitalists who wield power for them all year round. The grass-root movement to elect a president for change actually elected Wall Street for non-change.

The representative democracy has failed. The struggle for an utterly new direct democratic system bypassing the capitalist plutocracy power route will transform the political system from timocracy or plutocracy to people’s democracy.


chaotician
New Mexico

Andrew Carnegie is famous for picking Good Men to do the work which made him wealthy; his job he said was to make this men work together for achieving the goals of each of them so that all were successful! Barry has failed very badly in picking men and women! He has surrounded himself with Clinton retreads; and retained many of George's selections in some mistaken notion that doing so would get some support from the Republicans! Well, his choices of Summers and Geithner have been abysmal failures, his choice for Homeland insecurity the worse pick possible, and his choices for Interior, Environment, and most of the rest are poor at best; Of course, he has had to put up with the party of No; but a daily barrage of publicity on the appointments not getting done would have sent the cowardly Republicans back in their holes! That is one of the deepest disappointments; letting the Senate be a place where things are prevented from happening; and the Democrats have all the blame for allowing this to continue because these corrupted men and women would rather keep their exalted privileges, their "royal" prerogatives, their arcane rules, their bribes and kickbacks than do what is necessary to govern the country! Well, the Republicans have been successful; they have prevented the nation's business to be done; they have allowed a minority of the Senators to block votes, block appointments, block and water down needed actions; they have made a mockery of the people's votes to make change and they will pay the price! They will be held responsible for the coming disaster of the Republican resurgence; they will be the cowards which allowed the reactionary corporate Fascist, the reactionary Christian Right thugs, the discredited economic actions, the impoverishing trade policies, the ruinous, stupid foreign wars, and the insidious attacks on the social policies supporting our nation to continue! When the guillotines are brought forth after the coming years of economic slavery; may their heads be the first to go!


ed connor
camp springs, md

Yes, thge top 1% earn 21% of all income. They also pay 42% of all income taxes.
The bottom 47% pay NO income taxes.
Most mothers now give birth without fathers in the home. Nearly 50% of urban high school students drop out before graduation. The U.S. has slipped from first to 16th internationally in rates of college matriculation. Most foreclosures are made upon homeowners who took out "interest free" loans and never had any equity in the foreclosed properties. There are 12 million illegal residents in the U.S. who are unskilled and uneducated, and who are stressing local health care and education recources to the limit.

Did I mention that 90% of Americans ARE employed and housed?

Why you continue to blame the people who studied hard, paid off their college loans, worked their way up through their professions, and finally reached their peak earning years, befuddles me.

If you repeal the Bush tax cuts for only incomes over $250 K but maintain the cuts under that income level, you will only reduce the net revenue loss by 25%. There are only so many "rich" people to soak. Once soaked, we will retire, stop hiring and go away.

Who will you blame for your misfortunes then?


kathleenkatalina
Massachusetts

Americans get their news from multi-millionaires....Wolf, Charlie, Rush. None of the talking heads make less than 1/4 million a year, and none of them think they are rich.
Oprah, Warren Buffet, that Russian guy, they're rich. The talking heads are just middle class folks who make 5 or 6 million a year. And they have been baling up the Benjamins for the last ten years of tax cuts. Millions. Follow the money.
TV news, including MSNBC, keeps telling us that Obama is going to raise our taxes, but they really mean he is going to raise theirs.
The country is broke because of lies and incompetence, and all patriotic Americans need to sacrifice.
Just as the sons and daughters of the real middle class sacrificed when they volunteered for duty when Bush invaded the wrong country. The comfortable class has benefitted from our capitalist democracy, and they have not had to sacrifice. They have paid high taxes, but it has not hurt. Not the way it hurts the people I know.
They stand in line waiting to buy a few items. They dont use shopping carts. And after they add up to see if they have enough money , they are hit with a sales tax. On food. On the clothes and books the kids need. On gas.
My sister is 58, worked every day of her life, even during college, and she predicts that she will finally be out of debt in October. Then she can start saving for retirement. She had one child, not a dozen. And a husband.
Some people who are very well off have worked very hard, but so has every poor person. The rich have been lucky, and they need to stop being so selfish.
My favorite president needs to shame them into making the sacrifice.
If President Obama announced tomorrow that he was not going to stop their tax breaks, he would all of a sudden be very very popular. Follow the money...


Sandy Lewis
Lewis Family Farm, Essex, New York

FDR's predicament was different. FDR had not hired Bob Rubin, or Sidney Weinberg, for that matter, nor had he put Steve Rattner, arguably a criminal not charged by his administration, in charge of Detroit, only to remove him when news of his previous life emerged.

As and when news of Bob Rubin's previous life emerges, will the president remove his team?

Geithner was not smart enough to work at Goldman, Sachs, but he did the next best thing for one who would like to work there: he followed Goldman's line and worked to please Goldman, 24-7. There is no difference between Hank's team and Geithner's team, save one: Hank got the guys he wanted, and Tim Geithner can get no one to come.

Smart, honest guys do not want to work for Rubin in absentia. With Valerie Jarrett running things from behind the Oval Office, we have Larry and Tim and Valerie as the triumvirate under Caesar. And Bob Rubin is tight with Valerie, believe it. I got that from on high.

Hence, this Obama administration is really Rubin & Company. That's what we have here. Which wold work if they knew how to shoot straight.

No, it's late in the game to play the FDR 1936 Card. Save that one for 2012, when all the cards needed will have to be played.

For now, it would do to "out" them that caused it - and let the people know you know. The problem, Frank, among others - people think he doesn't get it.

And to date, it's clear the President Obama does not really, really get it. He's surrounded.

And those who have surrounded President Obama have the best insurance policy in the world in President Obama.

If the ---- hits he fan, big time, who will explain why He hired Them?