Hi. Since the election corporate media has wallowed in proving that new Democrats were elected because of bread and butter issues. Would that it were so. These essays well describe the critical need for full-out, immediate engagement of those public demands. These issues and the war become obviously merged. It's a false dichotomy and probably helpful, as the war can be ended without reforms, but not vice-versa. -Ed
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070219&s=editors The Nation editorial (February 19, 2007 issue) Which Side Are You On? Rarely does the response to a State of the Union address create more buzz than the presidential pontification itself. But that's what happened with the sharp lesson in populist economics delivered by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia. Webb's indictment of the Iraq War was direct and powerful, but it was his use of the language of class conflict in discussing domestic policy that really had the country buzzing after January 23. Talk-radio host Laura Ingraham referred to Webb's response, warning the National Review Institute Conservative Summit, "The party that comes off as the party that represents the American worker best is the party that wins in 2008." Republicans are right to fear Webb's words. Blunt talk of America "drifting apart along class lines" and the observation that "it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day" connect with voters soured on the GOP, as even George W. Bush implicitly acknowledged when he told a Wall Street crowd a week later that corporate boards "need to pay attention"to executive compensation. As proven by Webb's upset victory in November, and the victories of Ohio's Sherrod Brown, Vermont's Bernie Sanders and Montana's Jon Tester, candidates willing to break with the bosses can draw working-class voters out of the clutches of moralizing right-wingers and back into the Democratic fold. Now Democrats need to prove with deeds that match Webb's rhetoric just which side they're on. With moves to raise the minimum wage and tax Big Oil, House Democrats have taken some significant steps. Senate Democrats have done the same with efforts to raise taxes on executive pay. But much more is possible. Take the question of what to do about healthcare, our most critical domestic issue. George W. Bush's answer in his speech was to tax workers whose employers offer high-quality plans ("gold-plated" in Bush's snide reference) in order to cover a small number of the currently uninsured, while offering the wealthy yet another new tax deduction if they buy their own plans. The Democrats should counter Bush with a plan that's already backed by seventy-eight House members, HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act, introduced by Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich. Some 225 labor unions back the bill, which would expand Medicare to every US resident. A tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, among other measures, would pay for the program. Too radical? Consider that in September, an ABC News/Kaiser Family Foundation/USA Today survey found that 56 percent of Americans would prefer a government-run universal healthcare system "like Medicare" to our current system. Or take the matter of education. The median income of workers with a BA or higher is about double that of those with only a high school diploma. But as Jeff Madrick noted here recently, thanks to rising costs and inadequate aid, the march to higher graduation rates has stalled in America as other countries have surpassed us. How should Congress respond? It could start with the plan, proposed by Edward Kennedy, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, to forgive all college loans if graduates work in public service for ten years. There's more. How about dusting off legislation to deny corporations tax deductions when executive compensation exceeds twenty-five times the pay of the lowest-paid full-time worker? How about responding to Bush's request for fast-track authority on free-trade agreements by requiring the inclusion of labor, environmental and human rights standards in any new deals? Senator Webb invoked the example of Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms in the early twentieth century. That's a good place for Democrats to look for inspiration in turning Webb's message into enthusiasm for their party in 2008. More important, they can begin work now on an economic program that, to borrow Webb's phrase, will insure that the benefits of our immense wealth are "properly shared among all Americans." *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/opinion/05krugman.html?th&emc=th The Green-Zoning of America By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: February 5, 2007 One of the best of the many recent books about the Iraq debacle is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." The book tells a tale of hopes squandered in the name of politicization and privatization: key jobs in Baghdad's Green Zone were assigned on the basis of loyalty rather than know-how, while key functions were outsourced to private contractors. Two recent reports in The New York Times serve as a reminder that the Bush administration has brought the same corruption of governance to the home front. Call it the Green-Zoning of America. In the first article, The Times reported that a new executive order requires that each agency contain a "regulatory policy office run by a political appointee," a change that "strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts." Yesterday, The Times turned to the rapid growth of federal contracting, fed "by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does." These are two different pieces of the same story: under the guise of promoting a conservative agenda, the Bush administration has created a supersized version of the 19th-century spoils system. The blueprint for Bush-era governance was laid out in a January 2001 manifesto from the Heritage Foundation, titled "Taking Charge of Federal Personnel." The manifesto's message, in brief, was that the professional civil service should be regarded as the enemy of the new administration's conservative agenda. And there's no question that Heritage's thinking reflected that of many people on the Bush team. How should the civil service be defeated? First and foremost, Heritage demanded that politics take precedence over know-how: the new administration "must make appointment decisions based on loyalty first and expertise second." Second, Heritage called for a big increase in outsourcing - "contracting out as a management strategy." This would supposedly reduce costs, but it would also have the desirable effect of reducing the total number of civil servants. The Bush administration energetically put these recommendations into effect. Political loyalists were installed throughout the government, regardless of qualifications. And the administration outsourced many government functions previously considered too sensitive to privatize: yesterday's Times article begins with the case of CACI International, a private contractor hired, in spite of the obvious conflict of interest, to process cases of incompetence and fraud by private contractors. A few years earlier, CACI provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib. The ostensible reason for politicizing and privatizing was to promote the conservative ideal of smaller, more efficient government. But the small-government rhetoric was never sincere: from Day 1, the administration set out to create a vast new patronage machine. Those political appointees chosen for their loyalty, not their expertise, aren't very good at doing their proper jobs - as all the world learned after Hurricane Katrina struck. But they have been very good at rewarding campaign contributors, from energy companies that benefit from lax regulation of pollution to pharmaceutical companies that got a Medicare program systematically designed to protect their profits. And the executive order described by The Times will make it even easier for political appointees to overrule the professionals, tailoring government regulations to suit the interests of companies that support the G.O.P. - or to give lucrative contracts to people with the right connections. Meanwhile, never mind the idea that outsourcing of government functions should be used to promote competition and save money. The Times reports that "fewer than half of all 'contract actions' - new contracts and payments against existing contracts - are now subject to full and open competition," down from 79 percent in 2001. And many contractors are paid far more than it would cost to do the job with government employees: those CACI workers processing claims against other contractors cost the government $104 an hour. What's truly amazing is how far back we've slid in such a short time. The modern civil service system dates back more than a century; in just six years the Bush administration has managed to undo many of that system's achievements. And the administration still has two years to go. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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