By Ron Steinman

Everyone knows the population in the United States is growing. Because of advances in medicine there are more people over sixty-five alive today than at any time in our history. But there is more to this than most realize. Be aware, change is fast coming to the geriatric population, and thus to every one of us.

You may wonder what is going on, take a breath and allow me a minute to tell you. Some think that the Census Bureau only amasses numbers when it counts everything it can about American society. Instead of letting those statistic lie fallow, when done, experts turn them into useful numbers on which to understand our present and to help us see into the future. One of those reports by the Census Bureau called  90 plus in the United States  2006-2008 will surely make life for many of our legislators and politicians, whether nationally or at the state level, very difficult over the next forty years.  The number of people 90 and over tripled over the last 3 decades, reaching almost 2 million. Today, those 90 and over comprise 4.7 percent of those 65 and older.

Eight-eight percent are white. Eighty percent of the women are widows. Forty percent are married men. Over the next four decades, this part of the population might more than quadruple. By 2050, the 90 plus age group could be as high as 10 percent of America’s older population, meaning those older than 65 years. That is a significant number. With many of the women widows, more women than men will be alive. Strikingly, many more of the men and women in that age group will be living in poverty than the general population. In no surprise, the oldest men and women will have higher disabilities. That is inevitable as people age. These people will live in nursing homes or alone. Some may be fortunate to live out their days with family. Interestingly, today 99.5 percent of the 90 and over population have health insurance. Under Republicans, I fear that percentage will surely decrease dramatically. The concern is that in time people who are that old may overwhelm us with their growing numbers. Be warned. 

Where will the needed money come from to support this population? Right-wing fiscal forces are mounting attacks against all government supported health care as the federal government and the states wrestle with how they might best handle what many call entitlements, but what people who have been paying into the system all their lives only expect. They are not entitlements. They are due bills. It is worth repeating that Republicans in general and those Republicans specifically running for president all want to change Social Security, some by creating personal accounts through private insurance or even with accounts tied to the stock market. Imagine where those schemes would have left people today if they ever had become law. Many Republicans also want to revamp Medicaid by giving what they call block grants to the states. The question is who will monitor those grants to make sure the states use the money properly. All this brings me to more about the growing 90-plus generation.

Those on the far right such as the Tea Party and the libertarians, and worse, the centrist so-called compassionate conservatives, know they will have to devise ways either to curtail the growth in numbers of those 90 and over now, or stop in their tracks those on the verge of becoming 90. Whatever those on the right choose to do will have serious consequences for everyone, not only the aged. The Republican mantra is that every man, and woman, must fend for him or herself. If people cannot, the consequences will be dire. Most of the time when people reach beyond the traditional retirement age of say, 65, only a few are fortunate to have the means to take care of themselves without help from the federal government, especially today with state and private pensions often reduced or dropped. If people cannot have Social Security, and that includes most of American society, they face a very dark future. The odds are that their final years will be tragic. And the tragedy will manifest itself not only to the elderly, but family members who care for them and professional caretakers as well.

The information in the Census report will test the humanity of all conservatives. As you can see, I am less worried about the humanity of Democrats and liberals. Traditionally, they have bigger hearts. How each acts and how each proposes to handle the needs of the elderly in the future will reveal how those politicians feel about an increasingly aging population growing bigger all the time, and that is not going away.  Unless attitudes change and we learn to treat this coming crisis of old age, I fear the worse will happen to our sisters and brothers as they inextricably advance into the unknown years of 90 plus. There is no doubt that caring for the elderly will put a strain on how the federal and state governments function. Money to govern will always be in short supply. We really have no choice but to do what is right for those who manage to live long in our society.

There was a time a few years ago, when people who could not care for the elderly in their families, took their wheel-chair bound relatives and quietly deposited them at malls or on the sides of highways where they might die out of sight and out of mind, at best dumping them on society in general in the hopes that someone else would care for them. The tactic failed. But the scandal lives on. If we do not properly care for those who have long life, will that type of tactic again rear its ugly head? Only time will tell. 

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Neil Moralee.  Ron Steinman is executive editor and a columnist for online magazines, The Digital Journalist and The Digital Filmmaker. An award-winning producer for NBC News and NBC’s Today Show, he served as bureau chief in Saigon during the Vietnam War, and later as bureau chief in Hong Kong and London. At ABC News Productions, he produced documentaries for A&E, TLC, The History Channel, and Discovery. He is currently an independent documentary producer, director and writer through his company, Douglas/Steinman Productions. He is the author of seven books, including “Inside Television’s First War: A Saigon Journal,” that details how NBC News covered the war in Vietnam.

On the advice of many Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame” has been on the ‘should read’ list for years, but somehow I have never gotten around to it. More recently a youtube clip of him reading an excerpt was brought to my attention, so I watched that, and then checked out sections of the books that are available online.

The clip in question is a reading of the apparently infamous “The enviromentalist version of Star Wars” analogy (text from book here). Many apparently feel that this is a wonderful encapsulation of all that is wrong with “mainstream environmentalism.” Actually it’s a pretty good encapsulation of all that is wrong with Derrick Jensen’s arguments.

The short version (if you want to save 9 min of your life) is that Jensen uses a Star Wars analogy to mock nonviolent activists. eg:

“In a surprise move that will rivet viewers to the edges of their seats, other groups of rebels file lawsuits against the Empire, attempting to show that the Environmental Impact Statement Darth Vader was required to file failed to adequately support its …“

Straw Man Fail

Not surprisingly the case for nonviolence is NOT best articulated by a random collection of “standard lines thrown out by pacifists“, which is what Jensen uses to (mis)represent the nonviolent argument. A fair critique of nonviolent action would discuss and attempt to refute people like Gene Sharp, Bill Moyer or George Lakey, none of whom are even mentioned on the site.

Excuse me? you are pretending to critique a political strategy and you don’t mention any of the important current writers and thinkers? much less discuss their work and ideas? What am I supposed to believe? That:

1. Jensen’s grasp of the subject is so lame that he doesn’t even know about the core writing and thinking on it, and couldn’t be bothered to find out?;
2. Jensen knew about them, but has such a limited grasp of political struggle that he didn’t understand them, and hence left them out?;
3. Jensen knew about them, but since he had no intelligent response he instead chose to ignore them and substitute cartoons instead?

Strangely, none of the above explanations give me any confidence that Jensen is worth taking seriously as any sort of authority on political struggle; I’m funny that way.

Regardless, the fact remains that Jensen has not even talked about the case for nonviolent resistance, much less refuted it.

Even though he restricts his arguments to refuting cartoons, his arguments are still frequently weak or outright false:

It has always seemed clear to me that violent and nonviolent approaches to social change are complementary.  Jensen

It may have “seemed” that way to Jensen, but we know from history that when violent resistance occurs at the same time as nonviolent, it strengthens the oppressor.

From An interview with Lierre Keith

“Derrick Jensen always asks in his lectures for a show of hands on who thinks this culture is going to willingly make the transition to a sustainable way of life. No one raises a hand. So if we all know that a mass movement isn’t going to happen in time to save the planet, why are we bothering to consider nonviolence? Nonviolence only works en mass.“

Except:

1. A Derrick Jensen audience is largely made up of people who have self-selected as not believing nonviolent action can succeed. This “survey” is like asking a Church Congregation “who believes Jesus is our Saviour?”
2. Since when are “nonviolent struggle” and “willingly make the transition” synonyms? They aren’t (more like opposites actually), and conflating them shows either basic confusion or dishonesty.
3. “Nonviolence only works en mass” Red herring. What percentage of the population actually took part in nonviolent resistance during the civil rights struggles? the Indian Independance struggles? what percentage is needed to successfully wage (ie win) violent resistance? How different are those numbers?
4. Ask the same audience how many of them are willing to risk everything to wage violent struggle, then ask them to give up their cell phones, ipads and mp3 players right now “for the revolution”; then ponder the amazing contradictions and self-deceptions people are capable of.

Loaded Words Fail

Jensen never uses the proper term “nonviolent activist” presumably because that sounds too much like they actually do things and one of his memes to trivialize his opponents is to claim that they never do anything.

Instead he prefers the more archaic and inaccurate term “pacifist” since it is suggests (wrongly) that they are passive. That’s not quite enough though, so it is often “dogmatic pacifist” rather than simply “pacifist.”

Apparently he wants to convince us that nonviolent activists are unreasonable, nonthinking do-nothings, but without actually having to intelligently demonstrate it with facts and evidence. Since that isn’t possible I can understand why he didn’t do it, but he should just acknowledge that rather than waste our time with propaganda tricks.

Appeal to Ridicule Fail

Instead of intelligent arguments Jensen uses ridicule that plays on the stereotypes and ignorance of his audience to trivialize nonviolent action. In this way he affirms their ignorance while pretending to have critiqued the opponents position. Well Jensen, ridicule away if you must, but don’t pretend that you have said anything that refutes nonviolence.

Even so, are there not some truths in his version? Sure, but mostly truths about the audiences’ cartoon understanding of political struggle. Some truths about equally ignorant cartoon understanding by some advocates of nonviolence. No truths that I saw about actual nonviolent theory and practice.

One could write an equally valid “Black Bloc version of Star Wars” eg: “So then they tied bandanas around their faces, spray painted anti-imperialist slogans on the Death Star and threw rocks at the Imperial Storm Troopers.“ [Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha]

Yup, as a critique of Insurrectionary anarchism that sure is lame, vacuous, irrelevant, and juvenile … just like Jensen’s version as a critique of nonviolent action.

False analogy fail

The use of the Star Wars analogy is interesting though, because it appeals to a basic narrative that the violence advocates generally hold, and which Jensen himself explicitly rejects.

Simplistically, the fairy tale narrative is that “what is wrong” is due to a central power figure and his immediate circle of power holders. All “the hero(s)” needs to do is kill/defeat the “supreme bad guy” and then the unicorns will come back etc.

The appeal of this narrative is:

• the solution is simple; not necessarily “easy”, but simple to understand and relatively simple to implement;
• the solution will be accomplished by the Hero; the individual activist is free to cultivate a duality of feeling important by identifying/aligning with the Hero while rationalizing not doing a lot because it is really up to the Hero;
• It ends. When the Death Star explodes, or the Emperor dies “it” is all over and we can go back to being happy forest folk;
• “they” are bad, “we” are good. Any act committed against them is ok because they are bad. Any act committed by us is justified because we are good.

The analogy is false because:

“The solution” is not simple; there is no Supreme Bad Guy who is forcing the destruction of the world and causing all of the injustice. There is no Death Star, the destruction of which will make everything alright.

Of course there are some not nice people in positions of power who will fight to maintain the status quo, but “the problem” (as Jensen himself acknowledges) is our collective participation in a consumerist, exploitative culture.

“The solution” depends on each and every one of us taking action. “The Hero” is not going to save us (another argument that Jensen also makes). We each have to do things that could be described as making sacrifices.

We may well lose our lives, or at least as we understand them to be, and we probably will not get the prince(ss) at the end either.

There will be no end. The forces and factors that created this system will not magically go away by killing certain people (also acknowledged by Jensen). They will be with us always, and hence the need for struggle will also always exist. There may be pauses, but no rolling credits, no ultimate resolution.

We are not inherently good, nor are “they” inherently bad. Some of what we may do is just as bad as their actions, and may well result in worse consequences. Our motives do not justify anything and everything, and it is necessary to do the difficult, sometimes painful work of being introspective, self aware, and honest.

Derrick ‘Glenn Beck’ Jensen

Has no one else noticed that the self-proclaimed radicals use the same tactics and modes of nonthinking to discredit progressives as the radical right (eg teabaggers) do? ie ridicule, straw men and misrepresentations, loaded terms, false analogies, fairy tale narratives and simplistic solutions? Sure sounds like Glenn Beck, doesn’t it?

I know for a fact that both the teabaggers and self-proclaimed radicals refer to me as a ‘libural’, and in both cases it is used as a substitute for an intelligent response to what I have to say.

Here’s a piece of advice for Jensen and company: anytime you find yourself sounding just like a cheap Glenn Beck clone, you’re not necessarily wrong, but it’s definitely time to do a reality check.

If there is a cogent, intelligent argument for violent struggle I would love to see it. One that honestly engages the real case for nonviolence and does not build its’ argument on logical fallacies, misrepresentations and cheap rhetorical tricks. If any know of such, please let me know.

I am skeptical that it exists though, since every advocate I meet cites one or more of Ward Churchill’s ‘Pacifism as Pathology‘, Gelderloos’ ‘How Nonviolence Protects the State‘, and now Jensen’s “Endgame” as the “must reads” for a convincing case.

Convincing? yes! Since all three rely on the same straw man arguments and cheap rhetorical tricks I am becoming very convinced that there is no intelligent case for violence.

Struggle is not trivial

The most instructive thing about Jensen etc is what it tells us about the resistance movement as a whole. That arguments this intellectually lame and transparently false have broad appeal and are considered by many to be the creme de la creme of resistance thinking tells us that we are in deep, deep shit. If this is our best …

For there to be any hope we need many more within the movement to understand and be able to articulate the politics of nonviolence. At the very least to have read and know George Lakey’s “Nonviolent Action as the Sword that Heals.” Even better would be Bill Moyer’s “Doing Democracy“, better still Gene Sharp’s writings (or these,) or any works of equal substance.

Only when arguments like Jensen’s Star Wars version are laughed at because the audience sees them for the idiocy that they are rather than thinking they are credible will we begin to mature as a movement.

Image Credits:

Star Wars Series by Wyckthöor

Star Wars Pullips By kelvin255

Star Wars Republic Commando – Vode An, Brothers All by Thorsten Becker

Star Wars wedding cake- Han & Leia by SomeRandomNerd

My Star Wars helmet collection by superrune

Star Wars – The Exhibition by Andres Rueda

UPDATE: The House passed health care reform. The legislative body took two votes. The first was on the already passed Senate bill. It will now go to the Presidents desk to be signed into law. The second vote was on the reconciliation bill, which is a bill of “fixes” that alters aspects of the Senate bill.  It passed 220 – 211.

Democrats hail the victory as historic while Republicans say this vote will cause a loss of Democratic seats in the November midterm elections.

Thirty-three Democrats joined all Republicans in opposition. But it wasn’t enough for defeat.  The Democratic leadership appeared to have the votes secured after an agreement was reached between antiabortion Democrats and the White House.

The measure is expected to save $130 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It will create 50 different exchanges, or marketplaces, for the uninsured to purchase one of four insurance plans ranging in cost and quality.

For what the bill does read directly below. To read more about politics, skip to the previous post further down.

- Families of four that make up to $88,000 would receive a combination of subsidies and tax credits to purchase insurance and health care services.

- An expansion of Medicaid the program that covers children, called SCHIP, and the program that covers the poor, Medicaid, would cover up to 40% of the newly insured.

- Individuals would be fined $700 and employers with 50 or more employees would be fined $2000 per employee for not buying insurance.

- The bill would close the infamous doughnut hole for prescription drugs for seniors. The government will pay for 75% of the cost of generic drugs and 25% for brand names.

- The bill would set up a commission to ensure that health insurance companies’ rates are reasonable to the market.

- Outlaws discrimination based on pre-existing conditions.

- It prohibits undocumented immigrants from buying private health insurance. It also makes lawful immigrants wait five years before applying for Medicaid.

- It spends $11 billion for new community health centers.

- The bill is paid for by raising the Medicare tax on incomes over $250,000. It also taxes high-cost insurance plans – plans costing $27,500 a year for a family of four.

- Youth can stay on their parents insurance until they are 26.

PREVIOUS POST:  The President agreed to sign an Executive Order that clarifies that no federal funds would be used for abortion. A group of antiabortion Democrats had been holding out their support until assurance was given.

Representative Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said “an agreement has been reached.”  After meeting late into the night with the White House and Democratic leadership. He said he will vote for the Senate health care reform bill and the reconciliation bill of “fixes” to the Senate bill.

The Catholic bishops had come out in opposition to health care reform because of the abortion provision. The bishops are also upset with the immigration provisions that prohibit undocumented immigrants from purchasing private health insurance, and lawful immigrants would continue to be denied access to Medicaid for five years.

With the group of antiabortion Democrats on board, it appears the Democrats have the votes to pass the legislation. Stupak said Democrats are “well past 216.” He is referring to the magic number representing a majority.

But not all Democrats are on board. Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said the bill does not do enough to reform the health care system.  “We’re paying the ransom, but leaving the hostages in the hands of the health insurance companies. It’s not real reform,” Lynch said.

Meanwhile, Republicans plan to use procedural tactics to stall the floor’s proceedings. The Democrats have the votes to overcome the procedural playhouse, but the Republicans can successfully slow down and drag out the vote.

Fireworks erupted on the floor of the House. A protester in the House gallery began chanting in opposition while some Republicans cheered him on. It is illegal for spectators to protest in the House gallery. Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters he had never seen lawmakers endorse such behavior. “These clowns are out there encouraging [them], in violation of the law,” Frank said.

Tea Party Propaganda/ Photo Montage by Maksim Maksimovich

Tea Party protesters called Rep. Frank a “faggot” Saturday as he was walking from the House office buildings to the Capitol. They also called Representatives John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver, II “nigger” as they chanted “kill the bill.”

Sunday, a couple hundred protesters have surrounded the House side of the Capitol. From the outside balcony off the House floor, dozens of Republican lawmakers took turns leading chants and holding up signs that read “kill the bill.”

The House is expected to vote on the Senate health care reform bill and then the reconciliation bill, which includes all the fixes, sometime after 8 pm Eastern Sunday.

Follow Leigh Ann Caldwell’s health care updates on Twitter.

This afternoon the House Budget Committee reported The Reconciliation Act of 2010 to the House of Representatives by a vote of 21 yays to 16 nays.  Included in the release is a Public Health Insurance Option on page 116.

The Public Option appears to have made it into the last incarnation of a reconciliation bill in the US House.  There has been immense pressure for 10 months over this component to health care reform, with those on the right comparing to socialized medicine and those on the left considering their fall back position, their line in the sand.

On page 116 of the document, released in pdf form and available for everyone to read on the budget.house.gov website, it reads:

Subtitle B- Public Health Insurance Option

Section 221. Establishment and Administration of a Public Health Insurance Option as an Exchange-Qualified Health Benefits Plan.

(a) Establishment – For years beginning with Y1, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall provide for the offering of an Exchange-participating health benefits plan that ensures choice, competition, and stability of affordable, high quality coverage throughout the United States in accordance with this subtitle.  In designing the option, the Secretary’s primary responsibility is to create a low cost plan without compromising quality of access to care.

(b) Offering as an Exchange-Participating Health Benefits Plan.

1. The public health insurance option shall only be made available through the Health Insurance Exchange.
2. The Public Option shall ensure a level playing field.
3. The public Option shall offer basic, enhanced, and premium plans.

Soon after, it continues:

Section 222. Premiums and Financing
(a) (1) The Secretary shall establish geographically-adjusted premium rates for the public option.

If this is correct, that would translate into a version of the Public Option where prices would not be dictated by the very health insurance corporations who have jacked up prices over and over over the last decade.  Premiums have shot up 90% since Bush was elected in 2000.  Last year, the profits of the top 5 giants (Wellpoint, UnitedHealth, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana) rose by 56%.  The cost of health insurance is projected to nearly double again by 2020 with the lack of real reform.  To protect their scheme, these corporations have fought hard to preserve their hold on highly consolidated markets, and keep any version of a Public Option out of the plan.

Whether or not there are the necessary votes to pass the reconciliation bill are a matter of some debate.  Never the less, the inclusion of a Public Health Insurance Option certainly seems to be a big win for reformers.

Last year today was probably one of the best day in President Obama’s life, but today could not be more different. As if  it isn’t  enough to have to deal with the major humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake,but  President Obama and the Democrats have now to cope with the political seismic shock of Scott Brown’s victory for  the seat of Ted Kennedy. If the “Lion of the Senate” was still alive today, he would very likely be even more upset than the President. Ted Kennedy died for a second time last night, not literally of course, but in spirit. What some of Massachusetts’ voters did, by electing Scott Brown, could kill the Senator’s political life work & legacy.

The Obama administration has now the major headache of trying to get bills voted in the Senate without their previous super majority. The Congress was already barely functioning, but with the magical 60 votes gone, the legislative process could become completely gridlocked. The first target will be of course the health care reform bill, which will be bounced around between the House and the Senate to become an empty shell of its original intention.

It is likely that the “political instinct” of the Obama administration and most Democrats will be to retreat & compromise even more with the GOP, just for the sake of passing some sort of health care bill. On the issue of a finance reform bill and an immigration bill, Americans should keep their expectations very low unless the Obama administration and the Democrats change their tactics in dealing with the systematic obstructionism from the Republicans. However, they are unlikely to do so, if nothing else it seems that the White House would rather use the “sharp elbows” of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel against the left rather than the right of the party.What has even more global consequences than a lack of action on finance & immigration reforms will be for Republicans to make sure that no significant bill is passed on tackling climate change.

After Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980, Ted Kennedy made the following statement, which strangely apply to  the Democrats’ current political predicament: “If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose and deserve to lose. The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties.”

Instead of sending the usual spin doctors to minimized yesterday’s fiasco, President Obama should meditate on the wise words of Ted Kennedy. It is not the left that has deserted the Democrats in their support yesterday, it is the other way around. President Obama’s political agenda is not “too ambitious” like some say, it is too tentative. The “audacity of hope” is long forgotten and has been replaced by the grind of pragmatism. The enthusiasm which carried Barack Obama to the White House last year is fading fast, it has been replaced by a populist raw anger which the GOP managed to ride to victory last night.

General De Gaulle made the following statement half a century ago:“You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidity they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.” This is exactly what a majority of voters did yesterday in Massachusetts, and by doing so they made the task of governing extremely challenging for the Obama administration.

President Obama is rallying House Democrats to support a deal with organized labor on the excise tax. President Obama has convinced labor to support the deal after days of meetings and union threats to oppose health care reform.

The deal is that instead of family health insurance plans worth more than $23,000 be taxed 40%, the threshold will rise to $24,000.

But will it be enough to convince 218 House Democrats to support the new bill?

The excise tax was a crucial issue simply because of the deadly combination of unions and elections. If Democrats upset the unions, their 2010 political destiny would suffer. For Democrats, the unions are top organizers, campaign contributors and election day participants. More so than any other single group.

But, Democrats have other constituencies as well, including liberals.

Some House Democrats are fighting more than the excise tax. They want to maintain subsidies for low- and mid-income people, an expansion of Medicaid for the poor, an end to the health insurance anti-trust exemption, mandates that employers provide insurance, and the public option. All of these are in the House version of the bill, not the Senate.

Attention has been placed on the excise tax because of the power of the unions. But no word if House Democrats will receive anything from their laundry list of liberal demands listed above. The next couple of days will reveal if liberal Democrats will accept the excise tax as the great compromise and decide to support for the bill, or if they will push for more.

Please follow Leigh Ann Caldwell on Twitter, and read this author’s  archive on News Junkie Post.

Discouraged House Democrats are meeting to discuss health care negotiations with the Senate. But at least two members will be absent from that meeting.

As members left the House chamber for the first and last vote of the day to bring in the second session of the 111th Congress, I chatted with Representative David Wu (D-OR) about the unimportant issue of brutally long plane flights.  (I just took one last month.)

As we spoke, out walked a casually dressed Representative Gene Taylor (D- Miss).  He and Rep. Wu had plans to see WAR, the legendary long-running funk band most popular in the 1970s, at the Birchmere in Northern Virginia this evening.  Rep. Wu told me about their plans and Rep. Taylor chimed in. Taylor said he would rather go see WAR than go to a Democratic Caucus meeting “to be persuaded to vote for a bill I’m not going to support.”

Rep. Taylor is a conservative Democrat from a conservative district and a member of the Blue Dog Democrats. He was  one of 39 Democrats who voted against health care reform in November.

Rep. Wu, an Oregon liberal, is likely to support the final bill.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi huddles her visibly frustrated Democratic colleagues in a room to hash out how to maneuver negotiations with the Senate on health care reform, Wu and Taylor, an unlikely duo, will likely be grooving to “Low Rider” and “Why Can’t We be Friends.”

For these two lawmakers, an evening out beat out politics, for one night anyway.

Please follow Leigh Ann Caldwel on Twitter.

Private health insurance companies showed the real power of their muscle after Saturday’s senate vote. Despite Harry Reid’s win in getting the 60 votes he need to move the health care bill forward, in the end, the legislation would do little to help working class Americans because it did not include a public option.

In order to get Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson to be the 60th vote needed to stop a GOP filibuster, Reid had to “compromise” and wipe out the public option from the bill. Other centrists also pressured Reid to get rid of the government-run plan, which would have been the only non-corporate option Americans could have had.

The Democrats also allowed the private insurance corporations to get away without paying an insurer tax for another year. That saves the insurers $70 billion. It’s sick.

But it’s not over, after the next few votes on the senate floor, the health care bill will have to be combined with the one Democrats passed in the House — that one does include a robust public option, but the fight won’t be easy.

It will take real leadership from Progressive senators to put the public option back in the final health care reform bill. The leadership in the House side will also have to be tough in order to squelch the centrists on both sides that with no doubt will still look after the interest of the insurance giants.

This health care bill will definitely go down in the history books as an epic moment in modern American politics. If the progressives in Congress are able to get the public option over the humps of conservative and centrist opposition, it will be a clear sign that the American people still have power. If the public option never makes it to Obama’s desk, consider Washington, D.C. done for; the corporations officially rule.

Many of you may feel demoralized by Reid’s comprise with the centrists in the Democratic party — the Blue Dog Democrats that have shown their true colors: Red. We can hardly wait for the next election to try to get them out.

Nevertheless, the ride has been exciting for many. Progressives have fought really hard to make the public option a reality. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee ran TV ads in Reid’s state of Nevada to get his attention on the issue. MoveOn.org also did its part by highlighting Joe Lieberman’s stupidity. Dozens of activists were arrested at sit-ins across the country where they blocked the entrance of buildings of insurance giants to raise awareness of the issue. Unions also joined the forces.

It wasn’t long ago that I heard a report on NPR were “public option” was mentioned for the first time. Then, little by little, “the public option” was something mainstream journalists were writing about — it was on CNN, NY Times, etc. The hard work paid off, now the whole country knew that a public option was good and the poll numbers still show that support.

But the next phase is crucial. We can’t count on the Republicans, so the pressure must continue on the Dems. Keep those boxing gloves on and let’s get a second wind.

Follow Dolores on Twitter: @doloresmbernal

It is almost one year since President Obama took office, the expectations were high not only in America but across the world. In that time frame, President Obama’s approval rating has gone down by 20 percent in the polls as more people realized that he didn’t have a “vision for changing the world”, but instead has become the manager of a declining Empire.

During the 2008 campaign, President Obama had built what appeared to be a solid and unprecedented base of progressive Democrats. This support from the left is the only reason he had the upper hand over Hillary Clinton during the primaries. This segment of the electorate has been disappointed for a while by the Obama administration, but is now starting to be outright angry as most are coming to the obvious conclusion that the candidate for change has become the President of  more of the same.

In one year, the Obama administration has not delivered on most of the lofty goals and promises made during the campaign. The health care bill, which was the main focus of the administration for a full year, will likely pass this week-end but has been completely gutted of the public option, and is mainly a  nice Christmas present for  insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry.

During a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, President Obama gave himself the grade of B plus. I would be curious to know what grade someone like Tom Hayden would give President Obama. Hayden recently wrote in an oped piece for the Nation that he was going to strip the Obama sticker off his car. Hayden’s statement captures accurately the growing frustration on the left.

On Climate Change

President Obama called the Copenhagen Accord a “meaningful agreement”, yet it is a complete meaningless non binding deal which the US and China imposed on the EU and the poor developing countries. Lunumba Di-Aping the chief negotiator for the G77, a group of 130 developing countries, called it “nothing short of climate scepticism in action” and added that “Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush”.

Even so President Obama is not the only one to blame for the Copenhagen fiasco, the US and China have the lion  share of  the responsibilities  for derailing what should have been a binding deal. Furthermore, in the final stage of the negotiations in Copenhagen the small countries were excluded and denied a voice, as if President Obama, despite his early claim of multilateralism, had  fully embraced the bullying unilateral diplomatic tactics of the Bush administration.

Author, activist and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, reacted by the following statement after the political compromise, known as the Copenhagen Accord, was brokered by the US, Brazil, South Africa and China.

“This is a declaration that small and poor countries don’t matter, that international civil society doesn’t matter, and that serious limits on carbon don’t matter. President Obama has wrecked the UN and he has wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it is at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon hen-house without any oversight,” wrote 350.org’s McKibben.

The already weak climate change’s House bill will go to the Senate in the Spring, it is unlikely to lower carbon emissions much but it will lower our expectations on anything effective getting done to cut carbon emissions. The Republicans will call climate change a “hoax”, and a lot of Democrats  will do their best to please the coal industry and the oil companies.

On the Recession and Wall-Street

Lately we keep hearing from the Treasury and the Feds that the recession is over, and that we have already started an economic recovery. The road of recovery is very good for Wall Street; the two Indexes are back up and banks executives are getting ready to pick up some large bonuses in their Christmas stockings. Why should they be rewarded for collapsing the US economy? Because the system is rigged in their favor. As soon as President Obama was in office he followed in the foot steps of George W. Bush and continued the biggest transfer of public funds to the private sector in history.

The transfer was conducted under the jurisdiction of TARP.  The TARP funds had very few string attached to them, and were given to financial institutions deemed too big to fail. The justification and official goal of TARP was to give the economy a boost by unfreezing credit available to the consumer. But because the banks were not obligated under TARP to lend  back a substantial amount of the money, they kept credit as tight as possible.

The Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is Times Magazine’s person of the year. It is hard to understand why considering he was at the helm of the Federal Reserve and didn’t see the global economic collapse coming. But again, lets put things in perspective Adolf Hitler won the distinction twice and Stalin once. The Obama administration, under Treasury Geithner and Fed Chairman Bernanke, succeeded at  saving Wall Street from a financial precipice at the expense of  giving a life line to Main Street.

On Main Street unemployment is at record high, Americans are losing their houses to banks making no attempt to help by working with them to restructure their loans. During President Obama’s first year in office the rich are still getting richer, the middle-class is becoming poorer and some poor are literally becoming homeless.

President Obama had a unique opportunity to reform a catastrophic so called “free market” system, which reward speculation and create economic bubbles. Once again he did not take the necessary steps to apply real reforms, but instead kept Ben Bernanke at the Fed and hired former Goldman Sacks’ executive Tim Geithner to head the treasury. In this instance, expecting people such as Bernanke and Geithner, which fully belong to the culture of Wall Street, to crack down on their very own system is like asking somebody to think outside the box while knowing they are living inside the very same cozy box.

President Obama was elected at an exceptional time of history, in very difficult circumstances. Because of it, President Obama had  the opportunity to be a transformational President, but instead of  being the inspiration and the driving force of what could have been a peaceful revolution he followed in the foot steps of  his predecessors for the past 60 years and became the CEO of America Empire Inc.

Part two of this article will be  focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan and the peace process in the Middle-East.

To follow Gilbert Mercier on Twitter click here.

Too bad Howard Dean’s not calling the shots. If the former DNC Chair–who’s also a physician–was at the helm the so called Senate Health Reform bill might actually contain change we could still audaciously believe in. Dean drew the ire of both the White House and Senate Democrats when he said yesterday that the bill in its current incarnation should be killed. ” The way it is now, I’d vote no,” he said on MSNBC. Dean is pushing Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid to call for reconciliation, which would enable passage of a more progressive bill with a simple majority. “The Republicans would just ram it through,” he said. “Democrats have to get tough. We don’t have to be mean like the Republicans, but we have to be tougher.”

Today, as the nation’s largest union, the AFL-CIO joined the SEIU in vehemently opposing the current legislation, former President Clinton issued a stern statement calling opposition “a colossal blunder.” Clinton said the bill may not be perfect, but passing it is “the only responsible choice.”

As it stands the Senate version strips virtually all real reform out of the bill. Long gone is a public option, robust or otherwise ( a minimal public option remains in the House bill), And thanks to what “say no Joe” Lieberman called the “tyranny of the minority” when he co-sponsored anti-filibuster legislation back in 1995, so is the consolation prize Medicare buy-in option for folks over 55.

What’s left? For one thing, the mandates remain. Yeah, it seems the provision that would require practically every citizen to purchase private insurance or face a fine is encased in the cement of both the House and Senate bills. And the bill would put the kibosh on pre-existing conditions. But it’ll cost you. Something between three and five times as much as the “young, healthy rate.” Many of the widely ballyhooed penalties lodged against insurers vis-a-vis maxing out benefits and dropping coverage are dubious. Former Cigna VP turned industry whistle blower, Wendell Potter says the bill is filled with loopholes and the companies know just how to use them. ” This is a real gift to the insurance industry. This is the bill they wanted,” he said on ” the Ed Show’ on MSNBC Wednesday.

For his part, Pres. Obama continues to confound. He has stayed so far away from the legislative “sausage making,” choosing to spend inordinate political time and capital courting “bi-Partisan” support in the guise of Sen. Olympia Snowe and now has squandered the last two weeks coming out on the losing end of negotiations with Lieberman whose bitterness to the party that ditched him ( rightfully so) and allegiance to the health insurance industry that holds the deed to both his soul and that of his wife an ex-lobbyist for health insurance ( she’s under fire from Fire Dog Lake and others for her paid gig with the Susan G. Komen Foundation) made a brighter outcome improbable.

The GOP is a dead deal, Mr. President. Accept it and move on. They’ve been gunning for the bill from the get go. And anything else you come up with. The Republican effort is best summed up in the “Die-In” wackadoodle Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann staged earlier this week, and the “Prayer Fest” fright wingers including Bachmann and Senators Brownback and Demint held on the Internet Wednesday night to “kill the bill.”

Obama seems hellbent on getting a bill–any bill-passed so he can sign historic legislation and claim victory for the Democrats and his legacy. He admonished Senate Dems on Tuesday to stop fighting over” every element of the bill.” Some provsions may have to be dropped. You know, like all the good stuff. Just get him something, anything he can sign.

Seems short-sighted, no? Obama’s disappointed a lot of people and infuriated his base. And it’s showing in his approval rating, which has slipped to 47%( the first time he’s been under 50%). A new Wall Street Journal-NBC poll finds only 32% supporting the reform bill as it now stands; and 44% believe doing nothing is better than the reform in its current incarnation.

“There’s still time to get–not a good bill-but a less bad one, ” said Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas on Wednesday’s “Countdown” on MSNBC. “But all the bad stuff will be on the backs of the Democrats.”

Progressive stalwart Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa–a proponent of universal, single payer insurance–thinks there is enough good in this bill to vote for it. “It’s like we’re buying a starter house, not a mansion,” he said Wednesday’s “The Ed Show” on MSNBC. “We have a solid foundation to build on.”

But Dean, Move On, the unions and other progressives strongly disagree. In a bold “special comment” on Wednesday’s “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann called for a citizen boycott of any plan that forces mandates without providing a public option. “No public option, no sale, ” Olbermann said. “Fine me if you have to. Jail me if you must. I will not pay.”

As for me, I think I’ll move to Whoville for a while. At least there’s only one Grinch there. And in the end his heart grows so big ( hope he’s got coverage)he does the right thing, Maybe there’s still time for our congressional grinches to follow his lead. ’tis the season for audacious true believers, after all.