To get an understanding of why it is so difficult to get health care reform accomplished one needs to look at the concept of “Machine Politics.” If Americans were to embark on instituting an agenda of deep reform, they run into a huge log across the road-the heft and girth of corporate America. Major corporations and the Wall Street finance system are the modern equivalent of those old urban political machines that once exercised such great influence, especially over the Democratic Party. The big-city machines sometimes obstructed progress, but they also played an important role by speaking for working-class voters, new immigrants, and scorned ethnic groups.
A corporation speaks for itself, though it claims to represent shareholders, employees, and communities it operates in. A corporation finances both political parties, but especially the Republicans. It manages the nation's mainstream political dialogue by supplying a steady flow of expert opinion, ideas, and propaganda. When the largest and most sophisticated corporations work together in lobbying alliances, as they regularly do, their collective influence acts like a headlock on democracy. So says William Greider in his most recent book Come Home, America. This behavior is so commonplace that it is widely accepted as normal. Government is a profit center that private enterprise feeds off of and corrupts while it simultaneously blocks action on achieving goals that the citizenry strongly desires.
In 2002, General Electric earned 12 billion in profit but paid nothing in corporate income taxes. Indeed, it collected a modest rebate of 33 million from the federal government. Robert S. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice examined the years 2001 to 2003 and found 82 Fortune 500 companies with profits totaling 102 billion that paid zero taxes in one or more of those years. Instead, they harvested 12.6 billion in tax rebates. The 275 companies covered by McIntyre’s study produced 1.1 trillion in profit but instead of paying the statutory rate of 35%, they were able to shelter more than half of their profits and pay an effective rate of 18%-roughly what working people pay on their incomes.
The corporate income tax used to be a major component in the financing of the federal government, but no longer. Between new tax breaks and the rate reductions enacted by the Bush administration, the corporate income tax in 2003 fell to 7.4% of all federal tax revenue. In the 1950s, corporate income taxes provided 32% of all federal revenue-one third of the cost of government. When companies get out of paying their taxes, the burden naturally falls on other taxpayers. Business lobbyists continue to assert that US corporate taxes are higher than those in competing countries, but this hasn't been true for many years. Nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED), representing the advanced economies of Europe and Asia, pay an average tax rate on corporations that is one fourth higher than in the United States.
Before its collapse, Enron had 881 subsidiaries in tax haven countries (692 in the Cayman Islands alone) and had paid no taxes in four of the five years from 1996 to 2000, when the company's reputation for dynamic innovation was at its peak.
Boeing, the jetliner manufacturer and defense contractor, is another major winner thanks to tax avoidance. In 2003, it collected a tax rebate of 1.7 billion-700 million more than its profits.
The "Markets are the solution," crowd have been endorsing for years the contracting out of government functions to private, for-profit firms. This contracting doubled under the Bush administration and stood at 400 billion a year, according to the Multinational Monitor. The public became more familiar with the process because of the many scandals involving supplying services in the Iraqi war zone. The Army paid Halliburton nearly $2 billion for work that officials could not prove was done.
A corporation feeds on the government like a predator. It harvests vast profits from the tax money collected from other taxpayers while working with other corporations on other fronts to stymie the governing system. The corporate machine writes laws for itself (the tax code, for example) and disables existing laws to undermine their original meanings (such as labor rights and environmental protections). Through trade associations and think tanks, corporations collectively block legislation that might intrude on their interests-think of universal healthcare, trade reform, environmental reform, pension reform, and workplace reform, to name a few.
When the Bush administration legislated Medicare drug benefits for the elderly, he created a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the drug and insurance industries (their lobbyist helped write the legislation). Democrats had tried to pass Medicare drug benefits for more than 30 years, but they were always thwarted by the industry. But Bush's plan blocked Medicare from negotiating lower drug prices from companies.
Corporations, all in all, are "free riders" on the system. Like the US multinationals, corporations have abandoned the unwritten social contract of commitments to people and society. Yet they still demand and get preferential treatment from government. They extract wealth and favors from the public sphere, but do not reciprocate; this one-sided exchange defines the illegitimacy of the modern corporation in politics.
The power and influence that the large corporations have on our democratic process are the chief reason why health insurance reform is so difficult to accomplish. The desires of the American people to see this reform enacted are thwarted by the power of the special interests. The American public will have to review with close scrutiny which of their elected representatives vote for the reforming health care legislation. Those representatives who do not vote for healthcare reform need to be removed from office. Corporations should be called upon to help finance the necessary coverage to get the job done. Remember when “Ike” was president, corporate income tax helped finance one third of the cost of government. Now with all the billions in profit and the tax rebates they now contributed 7.4% of all federal tax revenue in 2003. Let's take the prospective tax burden for healthcare off the backs of the individual tax payers and have the corporations in America contribute their fair share.
Barack Obama voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act while in the Illinois Senate. In his book “Audacity of Hope”, Mr. Obama explained why he voted the way he did on that piece of legislation. “There was a bill sponsored by antiabortion activists that on its face sounded reasonable enough-it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn't mention that such measures were already the law)-but also extended "personhood" to pre-viable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe versus Wade. The measures, that were already the law, have been lifted right out of the document that was written in 1975 and are listed below.
(b) Subsequent to the abortion, if a child is born alive, the physician required by Section 6(2)(a) to be in attendance shall exercise the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as would be required of a physician providing immediate medical care to a child born alive in the course of a pregnancy termination which was not an abortion. Any such physician who intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly violates Section 6(2)(b) commits a Class 3 felony. The full text can be found at the following website: http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=1928&ChapAct=720%C2%A0ILCS%C2%A0510/&ChapterID=53&ChapterName=CRIMINAL+OFFENSES&ActName=Illinois+Abortion+Law+of+1975.
History has shown that the “trickle down theory” does not work. Republican President Hoover tried the “trickle down” theory (his words) to solve economic problems during the last few years of his only term, when the greatest economic depression this country has ever faced began. It is often called the Republican Depression because it was their financial philosophy that led to the collapse of the economy. Tax cuts for the rich did not work and things got worse.
President Roosevelt got into office, raised taxes on the rich, created jobs for the poor and turned things around. Mr. Reagan employed Hoover’s failed trickle down theory again in the ‘80s and again it did not work. The rich got richer, but the poor got poorer and the economy declined. Mr. Bush Sr. continued the failed policy of his immediate predecessor.
Mr. Clinton took a more progressive approach and, as Roosevelt had done, turned the Hoover model upside down. Instead of making the rich richer in the hope that they would spend that money and thus create demand and therefore jobs, he created a tax environment that encouraged the creation of jobs directly. It was an economic environment where everyone could get rich, not just a few, and it worked. Lots of jobs and lots of new millionaires were created while Clinton was in office. More new millionaires were created during the Clinton administration than at any other time in our history.
President Bush II slipped into office and once again applied the Neo-Con mantra of the old trickle down tax model and immediately created a need to raise the debt level to pay for an unjustified tax cut in 2001. Predictably (and before 9/11) the nation lost jobs and there were fewer new millionaires. Not learning from his past mistakes, Bush pushed through yet more tax cuts in 2003, 2005 and 2006 -- all while expanding the military, the largest single component of the budget. He and his lap dog Republican Congress never learned from their mistakes. As a result, the national debt has increased an average of $1.5 billion per day since the beginning of 2002.
To sum it up then:
1. Since the Neo-Conservative movement has become the dominant force in the Republican Party the national debt has grown and continues to grow at an unsustainable rate, by any measure you care to use.
2. Experience has shown that “trickle down tax cuts” only work to concentrate the nation’s wealth into fewer hands and never help to rebound the economy.
3. Mr. Bush never had a viable plan to deal with the debt he has already created,
4. The only time we have seen national debt reduction in the past 60 years was when Democrats were totally in charge of our government or when one party was in the White House and another ran Congress.
5. In the past 60 years when Republicans were in control of the presidency and both Houses of Congress, government spending was never reduced. The last time a Republican Congress reduced the national debt was in 1947, under Democrat Harry Truman’s leadership.
6. The last time the debt was reduced was in 1961 during President Kennedy’s first year in office. It has been almost a half century, 46 years, since this nation has paid down any of its exponentially increasing debt. (Had President Bill Clinton been in office one more year we would probably have seen a debt decrease in 2001.) (Information courtesy of Steve McGourty http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm )
Nationally syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff has again used his column to distort Barack Obama’s vote on abortion legislation in the Illinois legislature. He doesn't mention that the particular bill that he was referring to, was sponsored by anti-abortion activists and that on its face sounded reasonable enough-it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn't mention that such measures were already the law)-but also extended "personhood" to pre-viable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe vs. Wade. That was why he voted against it, not as Mr. Hentoff has stated in his column “That when he had the power to prevent the destruction of live born babies he voted against it."
Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage. We need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers in order to provide them a greater opportunity to choose life over abortion. The economic reform that America needs will not occur in a neocon “borrow and spend” Republican administration headed by John McCain. He will just continue the failed economic policies of the Bush, Cheney and Rove administration and of that we have had Enough!
In reference to the out of context quote that the media had turned into one word “Bitter”, Barack Obama did talk about Pennsylvanians being bitter. It is the context for which the media deliberately did not frame it in that is disturbing. But even so, most people in Pennsylvania that are struggling are in fact bitter, lets’ just admit it. Is it so bad to engage in a little self reflection and admit to ourselves, families, friends and neighbors that we are not happy with our government, most of us that pay attention do it every day that is. Just take a look at the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.
We should all ask ourselves; Why after all our complaints and bad feelings toward our government do we consider it so horrible to have a presidential candidate who realizes it? Then I would ask you; How else do you suppose a candidate should be considered by the people? Should they tell us what we want to hear to make us feel good? Should they divide us based on the classic wedge issues such as gun control and abortion to win us over on the passions of one issue while cheating us on the rest?
If people are happy with the price of gas, fine. If the people are content with the negative, out of touch and slow pace of how our government works, fine. If everyone in Pennsylvania is happy that our national debt is the largest in the history of the world and carried in large part by communist China, fine. But if they’re not, maybe we are bitter and maybe we should admit it. Maybe we should admit we are bitter about the outrageous cost of fuel. Maybe we are bitter about American manufacturing jobs being shipped to China and Mexico and the fact that around the fourth of July I have a hard time finding and buying an American flag that wasn’t made in China.
The fact is, despite how Barack Obama’s comments were misconstrued he’s right either way. There is bitterness toward our government here and across Pennsylvania and there should be. Our government has been hijacked by big business, big money and big egos and we know it. What Obama said was in fact nothing short of true and he did not say it to score a political point. He said it to point out the truth. When it comes right down to it reminds me of the classic movie “A Few Good Men” where Jack Nicholson says “You want the truth?.......You can’t handle the truth!” Are Pennsylvanians people who can’t handle the truth? I hope not. Vote for the truth not for the same Republican denial we have been subjected to for these past eight years.
Forbes: Senator Obama has a series of tax proposals and tax actions that would devastate the American economy. For example, he has voted to increase income taxes on individuals earning as little as $32,000 a year. He doesn't make much of that on the campaign trail, but he did that in the Senate.
Obama (June 12, 2008): If you are a family making less than $250,000 a year, my plan will not raise your taxes. Period. Not income tax, not payroll tax, not capital gains tax, not any of your taxes. And chances are you will get a tax cut.
Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.
Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.
The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves.
What General Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain’s war service, though heroic, didn’t necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous — especially given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero.
Yet the Clark affair did reveal something important — not about General Clark, but about Mr. McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove.
It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.
But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing.
The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service.
The willingness of the McCain campaign to engage in these tactics, employing such tainted spokesmen, tells us that the campaign has decided to go negative — specifically, to apply the strategy Karl Rove used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 (but not so effectively in 2006), that of portraying Democrats as unpatriotic.
And sure enough, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times reports signs of the “increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation.”
Will Rovian tactics work this year?
In 2002 and 2004, Republicans were so successful at playing the patriotism card thanks to a combination of compliant media and cowering Democrats. At first, the Clark affair suggested that nothing has changed. News organizations reported as fact the false assertion that General Clark criticized Mr. McCain’s military service, and the Obama campaign rushed to “reject” his remarks.
“Two days into the Wesley Clark fallout,” wrote the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday morning, “the press, the G.O.P., and the Obama campaign all seem to have agreed that Clark’s recent remarks on John McCain’s service record were at best impolitic and at worst despicable.”
Since then, however, both the press and the Obama campaign seem to have recovered some of their balance. Opinion pieces have started to appear pointing out that General Clark didn’t say what he’s accused of saying. Mr. Obama has also declared that General Clark doesn’t owe Mr. McCain an apology for his “inartful” remarks and denies that his own condemnation, in a speech given on Monday, of those who “devalue” military service was aimed at the general.
In the end, the Clark affair may have strengthened the Obama campaign. Last week, with his cave-in on wiretapping, Mr. Obama was showing disturbing signs of falling into the usual Democratic cringe on national security. This may have been the week he rediscovered the virtues of standing tall.
Furthermore, my sense, though it’s hard to prove, is that the press is feeling a bit ashamed about the way it piled on General Clark. If so, news organizations may think twice before buying into the next fake scandal.
If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.
John McCain a “Fiscally Conservative Republican has sewn up the Republican nomination let’s review the spending practices of the presidential administrations over the past 30 years.
As President Reagan entered office in 1981 he repeatedly called for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, yet never submitted a balanced budget himself. Many on the right reflexively blame the Democratically controlled Congress for the “big spending” during his administration, even though Republicans controlled the Senate for the first six years of his two terms. Only during the last two years of the Reagan administration was the Congress completely controlled by Democrats, and the records show that the growth of the debt slowed during this period. Reagan himself was an award winning, record setting liberal spender. While Mr. Reagan was in office this nation’s debt went from just under 1 trillion dollars to over 2.6 trillion dollars, a 200% increase. The sad part about this increase is that it was not to educate our children, or to improve our infrastructure, or to help the poor, or even to finance a war. Reagan’s enormous increase in the national debt was not to pay for any noble cause at all; his primary unapologetic goal was to pad the pockets of the rich.
George Bush Sr. followed in Reagan’s shadow after his election in 1988, by increasing the debt on average 11.8% a year during his four years as President. In his last year in office he quite responsibly worked with Democrats to raise taxes to help reduce the massive yearly increases in the national debt. This bipartisan plan got the growth down to under 11% in 1992, but it was too little too late and didn’t make much difference in the overall trend. The Neo-Conservatives controlling the Republican Party rewarded him for putting the nation’s future above his party’s ideology by throwing him out of office even though it had hardly been a year since he won the Gulf War (with a valid reason and a genuine coalition).
In 1993 President Clinton (a tax and spend liberal) inherited the deficit spending problem and did more than just talk about it; he fixed it. In his first two years and with a cooperative Democratic Congress he set the course for the best economy this country has ever experienced. Then he worked with what could be characterized as the most hostile Congress in history, led by Republicans for the last six years of his administration. Yet, under constant personal attacks from the right, he still managed to get the growth of the debt down to 0.32% (one third of one percent) his last year in office. Had his policies been followed for one more year the debt would have been reduced for the first time since the Kennedy administration.
When President Bush II came into office in 2001 he quickly turned all that progress around. With the help of a Republican controlled Congress he immediately gave a massive tax cut based on a failed economic policy (trickle down economics). The last year Mr. Clinton was in office the nation borrowed 18 billion dollars. The first year Mr. Bush II was in office he had to borrow 133 billion. The first tax cut Bush pushed through a willing Republican Congress caused an upswing in government borrowing that was supposed to stimulate the economy, but two years later Bush had to push through yet another tax cut. The second tax cut was needed because it was clear that the first one did not work. Economic history tells us the second did not work either. As a result of all his tax cutting with no cutting in spending, in 2003 President Bush set a record for the biggest single yearly dollar increase in debt in the nation’s history. He did it again in 2004, increasing the debt more than half a trillion dollars. Since 2003 total borrowing has exceeded $500,000,000,000 per year. Even Mr. Reagan never increased the debt that much in a single year; Mr. Reagan’s biggest increase was only 282 billion, half of GWB’s outrageous spending.
If John McCain were elected, as the Who put in the lyrics to their song “Won’t be Fooled Again” the “New boss would be the same as the old boss.” Wake up America so we could proudly sing out the chorus of that song “We won’t be fooled again.”
Forty or fifty years ago the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers, the power brokers in Washington could make or break a politician's career with a phone call. Today, that force is the “tabloid" media of the 21st century. Take for instance the sentence that was taken out of context from Barack Obama, just prior to the Pennsylvania primary. That one sentence was reduced to one word "bitter". Even reputable journalists like Steve and Cokie Roberts used it in that fashion. Let's review the context in which the statement was made.
"Here's how it is. In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, they feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it.
"... Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Different, huh? Especially, as Salon.com's Joan Walsh pointed out, when you consider what Obama added after the spittle hit the fan. "They're frustrated and for good reason," he said. "Because for the last 25 years they've seen jobs shipped overseas. They've seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.
"And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we're going to make your community better. We're going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And, of course, they're bitter. Of course they're frustrated. You would be, too. In fact many of you are."
The media's influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every statement a politician makes is subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which that politician has no control, and combed through for potential error, a misstatement, an omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. A more subtle and corrosive aspect of modern media is the soundbite repeated over and over again and hurled through cyberspace where it eventually becomes a hard particle of reality. Political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in people's brain without them ever taking the time to examine them. Even among the most scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of the debate without any perspective on which side might actually be right.
We have no authoritative figure like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Morrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Daniel Moynihan said it best when he was in an argument with another senator who sensing he was on the losing side of the argument blurted out: "Well, you may disagree with me, Pat but I'm entitled to my own opinion." To which Moynihan replied, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. I suggest that readers go to the Annenberg website: http://www.factcheck.org to check out the veracity of political ad's and facts in the media. Two other sources to help sort out e-mail rumors are: http://www.truthorfiction.com/ or http://snopes.com . There is too much at stake in this election to inform your vote with media spin.
