January 2, 2012 --
It just seemed to me this New Yorker cover, entitled “déjà vu all over again" would be a good way to begin thinking about the political world as we march into a new year. This is the time we all look back at the old one, give it a report card, evaluate events. Here is a list of some things I found memorable, the Good, the Bad, the Peculiar, and notable quotes, a highly subjective selection culled from lists of others as well as my personal choices, mine and mine alone. We’ll begin on a positive note.
THE GOOD
1. By the end of the year about 2.5 million young people now have health insurance who wouldn’t have had it before because of the provisions of “Obamacare,” or the Affordable Care Act which allows parents to carry their children on their policies until the kids turn 26. This allows young adults time to start a career path with time to obtain their own insurance. If you don’t think that’s important keep in mind an emergency appendectomy in my family a couple of years ago cost $26,000, a tough pill to swallow if you are in your early twenties and don’t yet have coverage. Not exactly popular with conservatives but I see this as a very good thing, worthy enough to fight to keep it in place.
2. The Dodd-Frank Act is still on the books despite cries of woe from conservatives. It takes its licks from some progressives as being insufficient to prevent a future financial crises and obligatory bailouts, and from conservatives who claim the reform went too far, restricting financial institutions from making loans.
The regulatory changes cover capital investment by banks and insurance companies, new regulation of hedge funds, alters the definition of accredited investors, requires reporting by all public companies on CEO to median employee pay ratios and other compensation data, enforces equitable access to credit for consumers, and provides incentives to promote banking among low- and medium-income residents. If it can fend off its fierce opponents it should do a lot of good.
3. Consumer Protection Agency, a little wedge of the Dodd-Frank pie. Among other things it means to do for financial instruments what the nutrition labels do for food products. Plain English. Easy to read display. No mice type. Lenders hate it. In testimony before the committee they claimed if they had to follow those rules they couldn’t make any money. What? Unless you are allowed to flim-flam the public, operate shell games, you can’t make any money? Somebody should, as in the song lyric, take you by “the sharp lapels on your checkered coat” and make you sit down, you’re rocking the boat.
4. Elizabeth Warren is running for a Senate seat from Massachusetts. The academic Ms. Warren created the Consumer Protection Agency for the Obama Administration, put up with vicious personal attacks from Republican senators in hearings but held her own. When the President didn’t see how he could get her confirmed as the head of it and appointed someone else, in disgust she jumped into the fray to challenge Republican Senator Scott Brown and if she survives the torrent of negative advertising being thrown up against her, some of it pretty repulsive, and wins the seat it will launch the career of another energetic, powerful, feisty woman in politics.
5. We have new Environmental Protection Agency standards on mercury and air toxics for power pants. This is a big deal. By sharply reducing toxic emissions tens of thousands of lives should be saved every year and birth defects, learning disabilities and respiratory diseases will be prevented. The I.Q.’s of children are being damaged by the eating of fish caught in fresh waters. It should prevent up to 46,000 premature deaths, 540,000 asthma attacks among children, 24,500 emergency room visits and hospital admissions.
Mother Jones did a run down on this, reporting that while dozens of old coal-fired power plants will close they are scheduled to shut down anyway and are being replaced by abundant and cheaper natural gas. This will not, as conservatives cry, cause power outages.
What’s the cost? About $10 billion annually, but the total health and economic benefits are $90 billion annually. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. As Mother Jones puts it: “It will make America more decent, just, and humane.” Maybe we should give gift subscriptions of Mother Jones to Boehner, Cantor ,and McConnell.
6. Occupy Wall Street. Say what you will about the movement but it has served a valuable purpose: shifting attention from drastic budget cuts to job creation and the rising gap between haves, or super haves, and have nots, or have not much-ers. While 99 percent of Americans are under economic stress, Wall Street financiers are back to their big bonuses, corporate C.E.O.’s are back to raking in big bucks, and members of Congress are making out like bandits (or is that redundant?).
In Congress the median net worth is $913,000 and climbing. There are 250 members who are millionaires as opposed to the country at large where the median net worth is $100,000 and has dropped significantly since 2004 (and I don’t remember 2004 as such a good old year either). I’m for paying these people a good salary because the quality of our lives is in their hands, but it is turning out that only rich people can afford to run for Congress, and somehow, once they are there, opportunities open up for them to enhance their holdings.
7. The government did not shut down last year. Of course it almost did a time or two due to the efforts of what Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post calls “the most reactionary and clueless faction in Congress — the Tea Party.” We dodged he bullet, but the fire arm is cocked and loaded aimed at a February date when we get to go through it all again.
8. The rotund diva has vocalized at last . It took about a decade but the last of our troops have left Iraq. And that’s a good thing. It is if we can persuade them not to indulge in a civil war that hey seem to pine for. If we can only instill in them the free market personal lust for money to replace their religious and tribal ambitions things might settle down over there.
9. Of course the biggest positive event of the year was the demise of Osama bin Laden and the sense of some closure to be gained from it. Critiques of the President had a bit of a problem of how to keep him form obtaining a political advantage from it which they soled like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady who sang “Now wait, now wait, give credit where it’s due … a lot of the credit goes to” George W. Bush? Oh yes, because he formed he team that did the deed some years back; hence, Obama may have stuck his neck out and ordered the raid but that was a minor role they say. Regardless, that chapter has blessedly closed.
10. We learned in 2011 that there is now no chance at all that Herman Cain could be elected our President Nein.
THE BAD
1. Vouchers. A bad idea someone thought up no matter what you apply it to, Medicare, Heath Care, Social Security, whatever. It is just another way to privatize. Using vouchers wouldn’t reform health care by allowing insuring those with preexisting conditions, removing caps, preventing arbitrary cancellations or work to lower premiums. Vouchers for Medicare would create something not Medicare under the old Medicare name, be a bonanza for insurance companies and cost seniors over an estimated thousand bucks more each year. And Social Security? Don’t even go there. And suddenly Mitt Romney has taken vouchers into his bosom. Come to think of it Food Stamps are sort of voucher, so why aren’t the voucher people for Food Stamps? If a big lobby like Better Business Bureau issued thousand dollar vouchers for a legislator to go to his campaign every time he voted against a new regulation would that be bribery?
2. Pledges. We’ve been over this. To get your vote I pledge never to vote for a tax increase, I pledge to work to vote for personhood, I pledge not to e-mail women photos of me in my underpants and so forth. One nice pledge, allegiance to the flag, is quite enough, thank you.
3. Personhood. Now there’s a can of worms (bad analogy). That should revive the controversy over whether candidates for the presidency were “native born.” Mitt Romney’s father, George was born in Mexico, Barry Goldwater in Arizona when it was Indian territory and not a state, Chester A. Arthur may have been born in Canada and John McCain in he Canal Zone and all faced challenges as to whether they could be allowed to be president. Under Personhood, it would be not where you were born but where you were conceived. Couples who traveled out of the country would have to keep records. Just to say “on the kitchen table” would not be enough. In all seriousness such a ruling would prevent abortion under any circumstance, the use of most birth control items, stem cell research and foster some exotic litigation. Would a miscarriage be manslaughter? Who would sign such a ridiculous pledge? Non other than Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. Now just where have I heard of those serious thinkers?
4. Catholic bishops are said to be pressing the once a Lutheran, then a Southern Baptist, now a Catholic Newt Gingrich to fight to outlaw contraceptives of all kinds and he seems happy to do so. Oh by all means let us turn the calendar back a hundred years to the time when if their husbands lived long enough most American women gave birth eleven to twelve times on average, as did my paternal grandmother and had no other role to ply in life but be a human brood hens until Margaret Sanger and other valiant women fought the system, served time in jail and otherwise suffered abuse until laws were changed. Sanger, a nurse, got into that fight because she was horrified at how so many births, though commonplace at the time, destroyed her mother. Candidate Rick Santorum, who casts himself as he only true conservative in the running, and his wife have seven living children after eight pregnancies. Heretofore Newt just collected wives, not children, but he’s got to appeal to social conservatives to win the nomination.
5. Tea Party obstructionism. Our Way or the Highway. The group of freshmen members of the House that Eugene Robinson refers to as “the most reactionary and clueless faction in Congress.” The way the system works these people who represent a relatively small chunk of American voters can shut down the government if they feel like it, are able to block whatever legislation they want to, and see no reason to negotiate any kind of deal that would give consideration to other peoples point of view. Just before Christmas they showed that they will not be guided by leaders of their own party. This is very dangerous. The next opportunity they have to shut the government down comes in February. And it’s Leap Year. We have an extra day this year to enjoy their services to the country.
6. Privatizing Medicare. “Hey, here's a great idea! Let's make the best government program we have into an inefficient cash cow for the benefit of the insurance industry.” So writes Susie Madrak on the site Crooks and Liars. The New York Times reported the Congressional Budget Office report stated such a plan would “raise the cost of Medicare equivalent polices by $34 trillion over the program's 75-year planning horizon.” Madrak: “While this plan would save the government money by reducing its payments for Medicare, it would mean that future generations of workers would pay far more for health care in their retirement. “Virtually all research shows that these sorts of plans will make the country's health care system considerably less efficient.” So who is or such a cockamamey idea? Why none other than the man who has a reasonable chance to be our net president, Mitt Romney.
7. Severe Austerity economics. Followers of economist John Maynard Keynes say “Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well underway.” That quote is from economist Paul Krugman but it expresses the view of all the Keynesians. You cut some judiciously, but spend some while it is cheap to borrow money, to help the economy grow out of its depressed state. When you get the growth you attack the deficit. Meanwhile you have protected the general population from being bloodied.
They say history backs them up. New Deal programs began to pull the economy out of the severe depression, but in 1937, F.D.R. “tried to balance the budget too soon and sent the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession” reports Krugman.
And here we re again with Europe as an example, where severe austerity is making things worse in one country after another. Ireland was going to be the shining example of such an approach, and the economy tanked. Britain made cuts, growth slowed, made more cuts, growth slowed more, and so it goes. Greece is now out of options, but we are not Greece and have options. However, if Republicans tighten their grip on Washington in November after the House Tea Party has had its way with us before then we could very well follow Europe down the bunny trail.
The funny thing is the Stock Market does not know what to make of all of this. For the first time ever it finished the year exactly where it started, only a one point difference. So we at least broke even.
8. The Gingrich idea of having children clean their school bathrooms, beginning around the ages of 5 or 6. And get paid (well, we are told Speaker of the House John Boehner did sweep he floors of his father’s bar, missing the American dream of cleaning the bathrooms). This sounds like some program of an autocratic government to me. Regiment the kids. March them off to work. At least he doesn’t have them making tennis shoes. There was a long article in The New York Tomes this week on the importance of the hormones released in a child’s middle years and something called “androgen dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA.” I did not understand a word of it except middle childhood is a developing time when a child could “take up piano, chess or juggling, learn another language or how to ski” or, as Mr. Gingrich suggests, learn how to clean bathrooms.
9. The idea that a country of more than three hundred million people gives so much weight to the opinions of a little more than 100,000 citizens in Iowa, the majority of them social conservatives, in the choosing of a candidate for the presidency of the United States. As Gail Collins put it in a column in The New York Times this is a “small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican.” So why is this bad thing? Candidates feel they have to win or make a good showing in this, the first caucus of the campaign, they espouse extreme positions and, to borrow a word Mitt Romney used against Newt Gingrich, it attracts candidates that are “zany.” Should we be forced to take seriously someone who capped a long standing relationship with the John Birch Society by giving the keynote speech at their 50th Anniversary Gala Dinner in 2008? Whose name appeared as author of blatantly racist newsletters about 20 years ago? Well, just a few days before the caucus next Tuesday polls show such person in the lead. Ron Paul. Thank you, Iowa. You are a big help.
10. Mitt Romney repeatedly characterizing Barack Obama as the worst president in the history of the country. If that were the case, following George Bush it really would be, to use the words from The New Yorker cover, entitled “déjà vu all over again.
THE PECULIAR
1. Rick Perry doesn’t believe being a member of Congress should be your day job. Legislators should just show up for a while every other year, pass a bill or two, and collect a few bucks for their effort. Well, that would give them a lot more time for their real job: soliciting money for their next campaign.
2. Mitt Romney claims that corporations are people. I will believe that when IBM applies for a student loan.
3. Representative Anthony Weiner sending to women that photo of his underpants, a kind of a switch on the crack falsely attributed to Mae West, no I am not packing a gun I’m just happily thinking of you.
4. Mitt Romney impulsively illustrating the difference between .o1 people and the rest of us by saying to Rick Perry not “I’ll bet you a nickel” but “I’ll bet you ten grand,” the .01 value equivalent.
5. I can’t get over Newt Gingrich talking about making John Bolton, who hates the U.N. and does not believe the U.S. should interact with other nations, our Secretary of State. That’s like sending the Lobo Wolf out to watch the sheep. Strange choice for a diplomatic post.
QUOTES
A few chosen from other lists and a couple I personally favor.
1. “We are the 99 percent” was named the top quote of 2011 by Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro.
2. Rick Perry’s ambition to make “Washington D.C. as inconsequential in you life” as he can make it. What I would like to see is Rick Perry being inconsequential in my life.
3. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” This was the quote from U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, in Andover (MA), in August that caused such a fire storm of conservative outrage. No, no they say, you don’t need any help to do it yourself. Accepting help from others is sponging.
4. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.” The famous quote from billionaire Warren Buffett from his August 15 op-ed piece in The New York Times revisited.
5. “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman on Twitter, Aug. 18, a crazy thing for a Republican candidate to say.
6. “Oops.” Rick Perry trying to portray a presidential candidate after failing to remember the third federal agency he would eliminate, during a Nov. 9 GOP presidential debate. It is also the shortest quote of the year unless you count a couple of times Herman Cain went “duh.”
7. “When they ask me, ‘Who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan?’ I'm going to say, ‘You know, I don't know. Do you know?’” When Herman Cain was a presidential candidate during an October interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. Well what do you expect? They don’t deliver pizzas to Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
8. “Instead of receiving the help that she had hoped for, Mr. Cain instead decided to provide her with his idea of a stimulus package.” The lawyer Gloria Allred, on Herman Cain's alleged sexual harassment of her client, Sharon Bialek, Nov. 7.
9. “This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich.” Said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) describing the debt-limit deal in August. Pretty descriptive.
10. "Pathologic Altruism," words used in a severely right-wing column sent to me branding progressive liberalism as such. Actually, I kind of like it. I like the thought of suffering from the disease of goodness. Now that as of a few months ago I no longer have an advertising account to service I think I will change my business card, removing "Advertising and Marketing" and replace those words with "Pathologic Altruism." On demand. At your service. Feels good.
TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF 2011 IN POLITICS
For the fun of it take this “Quiz For All Seasons” from said Gail Collins published Saturday in the New York Times. An end-of-the-year Republican presidential primary quiz that makes a nice prelude to the Iowa caucus coming up Tuesday. Here is the link:
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO IN 2012
If there is one thing everybody agrees on it is that, as E. J. Dionne put it in the Washington Post, the 2012 election will be a turning point involving one of the most momentous choices in U.S. history. This time that is not just rhetoric. This is for real. And the most important thing you can do this year is to vote in November. How you vote this time will probably affect how you live for the rest of your life.
On that point everyone agrees. Rick Santorum: “The debate,” he said, “is about who we are.” Gingrich: “This is the most important election since 1860 because there’s such a dramatic difference between the best food-stamp president in history and the best paycheck candidate,” getting his little dig in. Romney: “This is an election not to replace a president but to save a vision of America. Who are we as Americans, and what kind of America do we want for our children? It’s a choice between two destinies.” That’s the way Republicans see it.
President Obama expresses the Progressive view: “This is not just another political debate. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”
Do you favor Social Security, Medicare, student loans, Veterans benefits, and food stamps, or do you agree with Republicans that they are all redistributive? Do you believe as does the G.O.P. that the federal government is an oppressive force, a drag on the economy and an enemy of private initiative? Or do you believe your government has a role, or even a duty, to work for the common good?
These disparate points of view are coming to a head this November. How you vote will determine what kind of nation we will be, what kind of people we are, how we will live our live for years to come. You might give it a little thought before you step into the voting booth in the fall.
TOASTING IN A NEW YEAR OF POLITICS
Let’s raise our glass to two O twelve
The year we’re headed into.
In which our legislators have
So much they must attend to.
Let’s drink to hopes that we shall see
Democrats and G.O.P.
Work well together in a nice
Atmosphere of comity.
For Cantor and Boehner it’s down the hatch
Something stronger than Oolong leaves.
To bring their party’s recalcitrant
Tea Party members to their knees.
Wassail it is to House and Senate
May they stand back and discover.
They’ll get more done in the long run if
They treat each other as a brother.
To cheer Democratic chances
In November, lift the cup.
So much at stake in this election
Let us all go bottoms up.
So hoist one high and join with me
In hoping this year we shall see.
Laws passed that help the economy
While avoiding fierce austerity.
So drink my friends as this year ends
To living the next in clover.
That these good things may come to pass
And Hell doth not freeze over.
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