General Discussion

By Dave LIndorff

As I wrote months ago in an article titled America’s Stupid Health Care Debate: Keeping Some Ideas Off the Table and several subsequent pieces on my website, President Obama and the Democrats who currently run Congress have been hoist on their own collective petard by their craven and gutless refusal to consider adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system to finance health care in the US, or simply to expand Medicare, which is a successful single- payer program, to cover everyone, instead of just people over 65 and the disabled.

By Dave Lindorff

The “happy talk” campaign in the US media and coming from the White House is just that: Happy Talk.

To get a real picture of what is happening with this economy, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Yes, the rate of decline in economic activity has slowed. But that is to be expected. When an economy is going at full tilt, as the US economy was doing in early 2007, a slowdown of any significance yields huge numbers, in terms of falling production, falling factory utilization, falling car sales, or, this time around, falling housing prices.

But once you get to the same period in 2008, you’re already in a deep recession, and there really isn’t that much farther to fall. If, for example, the carmakers have basically shut down by fall of 2008, and are just working off huge inventories, then you are not going to see more factory closings and further reductions in production (how do you reduce production below zero?).

By Dave Lindorff

What’s the difference between a Blue Dog Democrat and a progressive Democrat? One is a vertebrate with a spine and a willingness to bite. The other is a jellyfish with no spine and no teeth.

This difference has been glaringly apparent in the current fight over health care reform.

The Blue Dogs in House and Senate have been giving the progressive Democrats an object lesson in how a small group in Congress can get its way. They have threatened to withhold their support for the Obama Administration’s key policy objective of a health reform package, and have managed, with just a handful of votes between them, to remove almost all progressive content from that legislation by threatening to walk if they don’t get their way.

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists like David Brooks, but today I can’t help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution, in which that site’s two economists speculated on what would happen if a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the side of the earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that side happened to include both the US and Europe.

"How cute!" my adults would say when they passed a black baby or a small black child. They'd grin approvingly at the baby and smile their acceptance at the baby's mom. Sometimes they'd extend a hand to brush the baby's cheek to prove their gentility. And then they'd walk a bit further, lean into each other and snark the zinger that angered me then and now, "yeah, they're cute now but wait till they get older." There it was. There it is. The not so subtle prejudice I witnessed in my family that millions of impressionable children witnessed in theirs.

As far back as I can remember I was offended by this language. But others in my family, in my generation, were not. Many assumed the attitudes and language of our adults and continued these prejudices into their adulthoods. Some more strongly than others. Some used the "N word." Some used "ditsoon," the Italian pejorative for blacks. In my large extended family, that includes several police, racial insensitivity was the norm.

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American journalists.

By Dave Lindorff

Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has gone whining to his professional organization, the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Assn., asking for support in calling for President Obama to apologize for saying he acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Prof. Henry Gates after first suspecting the prominent African-American scholar of being a burglar caught breaking into Gates' own home.

Sgt. Crowley claims he was totally justified in making the arrest on a charge of "disorderly conduct" (later dropped by the police), because Gates, who actually had been forced to break into his own home during a return from a speaking tour in China when the front door was stuck, had allegedly become "enraged" when the officer confronted him and asked for identification. Crowley claims that Gates called him names, called him a racist, and threatened to file a complaint against him, and that as a result he arrested him.

By Dave Lindorff

The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry “Skip” Gates is not that the police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into Gates’ rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.

But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his drivers’ license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.

Note for TomDispatch readers: Last year, at my birthday, I wrote "When I'm 64...," a post about war and (lack of) peace in my time. Another year has rolled around, as it tends to do, so think of what follows as further scribbled notes, stuffed in an e-bottle, and set afloat, all part of a future memoir I'll never write. If you finish and have the urge to know more about a Cold War childhood (and many other matters), check out the updated edition of my book, The End of Victory Culture. If you enjoy my description of my early reading experiences, then consider picking up a copy of my 2003 novel, The Last Days of Publishing, which, sadly, turned out to be prescient when it came to the problematic present of my lifelong business and avocation. Tom]

Borrowed Time: The World at 65
By Tom Engelhardt

"Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit; but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now."

So began "The Prophecy," a mock futuristic fantasy set after some great Cold War cataclysm, which several members of my high school graduating class collaborated on back in 1962. It was, of course, for our yearbook and made fun of the class, A to Z. It was also a classic document of the moment, written by representatives of the first generation of "teenagers" who, crouching under their school desks as the sirens of an atomic-attack drill howled outside, imagined that no one in their world might make it.

"First of all, let me introduce myself," "I" continued. "I am Thomas M. Engelhardt, world renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built, and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century..."

Okay, so they had me pegged. Not only, in those years, did I read whatever post-nuclear pulp fiction I could get my hands on -- you know, the kind with landscapes filled with atomic mutants and survivalist communities -- but I was a Civil War nut. Past disasters and future catastrophes, and somehow it all made sense.

I was, in fact, a nut for the American past generally, in part, I suspect, because the familial past wasn't available. My parents, typically enough for second and third generation Americans, were in flight from their own pasts, from all that not-so-distant squalor and unhappiness, or just plain foreign-ness, much the way, once upon a time, so many other Americans had fled small towns for the Big City.

My father rarely spoke of his own life -- his parents, his childhood, his years growing up, the Great Depression, and especially his experiences in World War II (and in this he was typical of a generation that did not come home from the grimmest of wars with the idea that they were "the greatest"). My mother acted as if her past were the proverbial blank slate. She told but three stories from her childhood: one in which she broke her nose in a softball game, another in which she jumped out of a second-story window to test whether a sheet would work as a parachute, and a third in which an evil but rich uncle humiliated her loveable but ne'er-do-well inventor of a father.

Perhaps that very past-less-ness left me with a yen for roots, which I then found in the sole place available: American history. Toss in the time an only child had in a room still surprisingly bare of entertainment, and it was hardly surprising that, as early as third grade, I started devouring the biographies -- hagiographies actually -- of assorted American heroes. They were little books focusing on Kit Carson or Clara Barton with memorably orange covers.

By Dave Lindorff

Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to happen to him.

But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now, that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called War on Terror.

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the labor movement by giving up the so-called “card-check” feature of the embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the “reform” legislation that has been billed as labor’s “number one issue” much less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in union-organizing drives.

A POW's 'Tears in the Darkness'
By John Blake | CNN

Ben Steele hated the young man as soon as he saw him.

The man's almond-shaped eyes, dark hair and olive skin -- Steele had seen those Asian facial features before.

He saw that face when he watched Japanese soldiers behead sick men begging for water, run over stumbling prisoners with tanks and split his comrades' skulls with rifle butts.

"Men died like flies," Steele says. "I thought for a while I would never make it."

Steele, now 91, is one of the last survivors of the Bataan Death March.

During World War II, the Japanese army forced American and Filipino prisoners of war on a march so horrific that the Japanese commander was later executed for war crimes.

Steele returned home to Montana after the war to teach, but he still had something to learn.

When he saw a young Japanese-American student seated in his class one day, he felt both anger and anguish.

What, he wondered, do I do with all of the hate I've brought home with me? Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious health provider rip-off, and then staging a “mission accomplished” photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates were promising during last year’s presidential campaign is dead, killed by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who hav e accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

Mourn on the 4th of July
By John Pilger | New Statesman | Submitted by Michael Munk | www.MichaelMunk.com

Liberals say that the United States is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, but behind the façade little has changed. With his government of warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, Barack Obama is merely upholding the myths of a divine America...Credible polls have long confirmed that more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves. They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even “anti-American”.

The monsoon had woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. “We are here not to kill,” said the sergeant, “we are here to impart the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86.”

Page 86 was headed WHAM. The sergeant’s unit was called a combined action company, which meant, he explained, “we attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite. Standing in a jeep on the edge of a paddy, he had announced through a loudhailer: “Come on out, everybody. We got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you.”

Silence. Not a shadow moved.

“Now listen, either you gooks come on out from wherever you are, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!”Read more.

Cemetery Workers Made $300K in Gravedigging Scheme
Authorities: 4 former workers at historic Ill. cemetery made $300K in gravedigging scheme
By Don Babwin, Associated Press Writer | ABCNews.com

Four former employees accused of digging up bodies and reselling plots at a historic black cemetery near Chicago made about $300,000 in a scheme believed to have stretched back at least four years, authorities said Friday.

Three gravediggers and a manager at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip are accused of unearthing hundreds of corpses and either dumping some in a weeded, desolate area near the cemetery or double-stacking others in graves. The cemetery is the burial place of civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.

While Till's grave site was not disturbed, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said investigators found his original iconic glass-topped casket rusting in a shack at the cemetery.Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from 9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

By Dave LIndorff

All you need to really know about the Obama health “reform” initiative is that it is being supported by retail giant Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, a corporation that was built on the philosophy of treating workers like dirt (the company famously locks its employees inside its buildings at night, forces workers who have checked out of their shifts to continue to serve customers, off the clock, if they are asked for help on their way out of the store, has bitterly resisted offering any health benefits, and has one of the worst records of labor law violations of any company in the country), is now signing on as an endorser of the Obama health reform effort, saying:

“We believe now is the time for action on this vital issue. We commend the leadership of elected officials who are committed to enactment of reform, and we appreciate the commitment to inclusion and transparency which has been present thus far.

by Linda Milazzo

This morning I received the following letter from President Barack Obama:

GM to Take on Future Liability Claims
General Motors to assume liability for future product claims, but not existing claims
By Bree Fowler | ABCNews.com

General Motors Corp. has agreed to take on responsibility for future product liability claims, removing what could have been a sizable roadblock on the automaker's path to a quick sale of its assets and emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a new company.

As part of its government-backed restructuring plan, GM wants to sell the bulk of its assets to a new company and leave behind unprofitable assets and other liabilities such as product-related lawsuits. A hearing on the proposed sale is scheduled for Tuesday.

But in a concession to consumer groups and state officials who had threatened to block the sale because of product liability concerns, the new company will now assume responsibility for future claims involving vehicles made by the old company, according to documents filed in federal bankruptcy court in New York on Friday. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

When it comes to reforming America’s disastrous health care “system,” there are two issues that need to be considered: access and cost.

The so-called reform proposals being offered by the Obama White House, the House and the Senate, are failing on both counts, and deserve to die.

No progressives should allow themselves to be suckered into promoting one or the other.