___________________________________________________________
THE PROGRESSIVE POPULIST:
A monthly journal of the Heartland
March 1998 -- Volume 4, Number 3
___________________________________________________________
EDITORIAL
Battlefield Conversion?
Can the Washington, D.C., elites become any more irrelevant to the lives of
the citizens of the United States? Our President has been reduced to a
laughingstock by the investigation of his sex life conducted by an
Inquisitor working hand-in-glove with right-wing zealots. The House of
Representatives is ready to impeach the President if the Inquisitor can
provide the Republicans with a pretext.
The media zero in on salacious speculation about rumored romps in
the White House, then roll their eyes and scoff at Hillary Clinton's
complaint that a "right-wing conspiracy" was dedicated to destroying her
husband's Presidency.
What else would you call the cabal that includes Richard Scaife,
the obsessive billionaire who has bankrolled much of the anti-Clinton
muckraking (see Craig McGrath's story on page 6); the Rutherford Institute,
which is bankrolling Paula Jones' lawsuit; and Rev. Kenneth Starr, who
apparently has been working hand-in-glove with the Jones team to set up the
President? By the way, Starr is poised to accept a Scaife-financed job
teaching law at a seaside university in California whenever he has finished
off Clinton.
We have been plenty critical of Bill Clinton when he has strayed
from the populist themes that got him elected. He has bowed to Wall Street
and the bondholders to the detriment of Main Street and the middle-class
wage earners whenever push came to shove on economic policy. His
administration squandered much of its good faith in his first term with
deals to push NAFTA and GATT, and those deals helped move thousands of
manufacturing jobs overseas. Now he wants "Fast Track" to pass more "free
trade" deals that ignore worker rights, health concerns and even national
sovereignty. He also presided over a "reform" of telecommunication law that
allowed the further concentration of electronic media in a few hands. He
endorsed the gutting of civil liberties in a misguided effort to crack down
on potential terrorists, drug dealers and Internet smut peddlers. And his
USDA is currently promoting regulations that would allow under the
"organic" label bioengineering, toxic sludge, irradiation, antibiotics and
non-organic feed for livestock and keeping animals in close confinement.
Any of those initiatives could have been brought by a Republican
(and sometimes we wish they had been). But in his time of trouble this New
Democrat has returned to the people who "brung" him: workers, women,
minorities - the old Democrats. In his closely watched State of the Union
speech, he returned to populist themes: He proposed to offer Medicare to
younger retirees, grant patients a Bill of Rights, subsidize child care for
working parents, hire more teachers and increase the minimum wage by $1
over the next two years and use any budget surpluses to shore up Social
Security.
The public responded by giving Clinton the highest approval ratings
of his Presidency, making it risky for the GOP to pursue impeachment
hearings based on accusations that emerge from the politically charged
Starr Chamber.
Clinton cut short the GOP's plans for further tax breaks with his
plan to "save Social Security first." The Republicans have been scaring the
younger generations for years with pessimistic projections about Social
Security and Medicare. Now the President is challenging them to do
something about it.
[Progressive Populist readers will recall that we proposed a Social
Security fix in December 1996 that would eliminate the $60,600 ceiling on
wages subject to the Social Security tax. We also would exempt the first
$15,000 of income for both workers and employers, making the payroll tax
more progressive. Low-to-middle-income workers would get a $1,100 annual
tax break, as would their employers, while the trust fund would net an
additional $24 billion a year from the high-dollar payrolls to help close
the projected shortfall.]
Clinton's proposed Medicare expansion is the GOP's worst nightmare:
another move toward a universal health program. Clinton's new plan would
let early retirees from age 55 to 64 buy into the government health plan.
The cost - $3,600 to $4,800 a year - would be cheaper than most private
insurance plans but more than most unemployed workers could afford.
However, insurance for the unemployed - who should still be relatively
healthy - could be subsidized and the expansion at least would get people
talking about universal health insurance, which would be a step forward.
[Note that Joan Retsinas offers a more pessimistic analysis of the proposed
Medicare expansion on page 12.]
Among those working poor who have lost their health insurance,
those who have been dumped into corporate "managed care" systems, and the
doctors who are forced to work in those profit-squeezing health maintenance
organizations, there is plenty of dissatisfaction with the private
insurance industry that the Republicans are so proud of. A survey in
January by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, conducted for the AFL-CIO,
found that two-thirds of the general public named affordable health care
and choice of doctors as serious concerns. Expansion of good old Medicare,
where clients can pick their own doctor and their own hospital, would be a
popular alternative. And if it works for those over 55, next we could cover
children under 10. In a few years, picking up the remaining relatively
health age groups, we could cover the whole country.
The Clintons gave the Republicans and the health insurance industry
an easy target back in 1994 with health insurance reforms that required
complex organizational charts. In comparison, expansion of Medicare - a
familiar program that has worked well to improve the lives of our elderly -
is simple. And Medicare for all Americans, financed with a broad-based tax,
would relieve small businesses of a major administrative headache and
expense.
Clinton estimated his "Medicare buy-in policies" would cost $1.5
billion over the next five years. Of his other initiatives, helping the
states recruit and train 100,000 teachers would cost $7.3 billion over five
years. Child care subsidies would cost $7.5 billion. The increase in the
minimum wage would generate tax revenue. In comparison, spending on new
weapons for the military would increase by $15 billion over the next three
years, to $60 billion.
Of course there is a strong possibility that this populist rhetoric
is just another battlefield conversion by the Comeback Kid, who will
forsake the people as soon as the heat is off. But if Clinton is serious
about providing a legacy - or just staying in office for the remainder of
his term - he should hammer the Republicans from now until November on
Medicare, Social Security, patient rights, a living wage for the working
poor and child care for working parents. Maybe then next year he'll get a
Democratic Senate that will give his nominees a hearing.
WAYNE O'LEARY, in "Those Generous Billionaires" on page 23, puts some
perspective on the purported largess of the new billionaire class. The
average household in the United States contributes about 2 percent of its
annual income to charitable causes but low-income donors are proportionally
more generous than the wealthy. According to the Independent Sector, a
Washington, D.C., based think tank that monitors philanthropic trends,
Americans with annual incomes below $10,000 donated 4.3 percent of their
household incomes to charities in 1995, while those in the $75,000 to
$99,000 bracket were giving 1.8 percent of their household income.
Millionaires and billionaires become regressively more stingy but even a
skinflint like Bill Gates can look beneficent if he flashes his bankroll in
the right place.
Why not levy a "fat tax" on accumulated wealth over, say, $1
million? A 2 percent tax on Gates' fortune would generate nearly $800
million for the Treasury, bring him up to the average level of giving for
American households and leave him with $39 billion. Is that asking too much?
- Jim Cullen
________________________________________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS, March 1998:
(Articles marked with * are available at our web site,
http://www.eden.com/~reporter.)
EDITORIAL *
Battlefield Conversion?
JIM HIGHTOWER
Re-Regulate Cable Rates
Trent's Trip to Fantasy Island
Taste Police Invade North Carolina
War Criminals
Luxury Lanes for the Rich
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR *
RURAL ROUTES/Margot F. McMillen *
Chickens Come Home to Roost
DISPATCHES *
MAI Protests Accelerate
NFU Urges Action on Small Farms
Biotech Setback
NATIVE GROUND/Randolph Holhut
How 2 States Pay for Schools
REPORT/Craig McGrath *
Right-Wing Spectacle: Dollars Have Strings
CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs
'Tokens of Friendship' Convict Lobbyist
TALES FROM EAST TEXAS/Carol Countryman *
Not So Harmonious at Harmony, Texas
LABOR TALK/Harry Kelber
Poison Pill for Workers
PRIMAL SCREED/James McCarty Yeager *
Reality Avoidance
FOCUS ON CORPORATION/Russell Mokhiber & Robert Weissman
Corporate Pipers Call the Tune
WORK IN PROGRESS
GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet *
Radical Surgery
FOOD BYTES/Ronnie Cummins *
Organic Rules: We Can't Afford to Lose
JOHN BUELL *
Beyond Fed Watching
COVER/Karen Winner
States Lead the Way in Demanding Quality Care for HMO Patients
HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas *
Government for the Prosperous
REPORT/Joel Bleifuss
Know Thine Enemy:
A Brief History of Corporations and What To Do About Them. *
COMMENT/Jean Hay
Corporations are People Too
DARYL LEASE
Joe Camel Turns on Big Tobacco
NEWSPEAK/Wayne Grytting
HMO's to the Rescue
COMMENT/Steven Hill
How to Bind the Nation
DAVID MORRIS
Electric Deregulation
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW/Sam Smith
BCCI: The Scandal That Got Away
TED RALL
Let the Good Slimes Roll
GLOBAL CITIZEN/Donella Meadows
Asian Meltdown and Capitalism
MEDIA BEAT/Norman Solomon
Scandal Districts, Big Lies Persist
THE AMERICAS/Patrisia Gonzales & Roberto Rodriguez
Escalating Wars on Drugs and Migrants
MADE IN THE USA/Joel D. Joseph
A Lasting Tribute to Sonny Bono
IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST/Ralph Nader
Wall Street's Bonus Babies
JESSE JACKSON
Stark Differences, Clear Choices
HAL CROWTHER
Hell to the Chief
CHARLES LEVENDOSKY
Back to the Dark Ages of Prison Policy
The Underbelly of Oprah's Lawsuit
MOLLY IVINS
Perhaps we should tidy the rubber room
What about feminists and the president?
Of political raving and a mad cow lawsuit
ESSAY/Wayne O'Leary *
Those Generous Billionaires
CHARLIE WILSON *
Morals and Fleas in Heavener
To get a one-year subscription to the PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, send a check
for $18 to the PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, P.O. Box 487, Storm Lake, IA 50588.
Please note whether you prefer the Email version or a newsprint version.
Free samples of the newsprint version are available to residents of the
United States. Email samples are available everywhere.
Entire contents are copyrighted 1998 by the PROGRESSIVE POPULIST, but you
are encouraged to distribute this notice to relevant newsgroups and email
lists and reprint for noncommercial use.
