Political Climate Change

Conventional Wisdom will insist that launching universal health care in America is out of the question in light of the financial meltdown. On the contrary, this is not only a good time to do it but society will literally have no choice.

Fifteen percent of Americans currently lack health insurance, another 30% are underinsured - large numbers of people who’ve been declaring bankruptcy for medical reasons actually had insurance but were buried in co-pays. A friend who came down with breast cancer who had reasonably good insurance had to come up $18,000 in co-pays for her treatments.

When large numbers of people become unemployed they will also lose their medical coverage. Concurrently, many employers, taking drastic measures to try to cut costs and remain in business, will reduce or eliminate insurance.

The current system will begin to go on life support, leading to a total breakdown. Government rescue will be imperative; action will also be essential from the standpoint of needing to cut costs on a systemwide basis. In spite of the many uninsured and underinsured in the states, per capita medical costs are consistently higher than in Europe; nearly double that of the UK. The current system will simply become unaffordable.

Change will also come from falling property prices: after the dust settles from the financial crash, that will turn out to be blessing for the bottom half of society. Once people have eaten their losses, both imaginary – when a way overpriced property goes down to a rational level it feels like a loss to the individual involved but it’s really just a reality check - and real – people are loosing their homes - housing will become much more affordable. In the process of throwing money at the wealthy - the economic imperative of the last 30 years - prices of many things have gone up, but especially in housing. Many Americans have been struggling to pay the rent for years; falling prices will provide some respite.

It was recently said that housing is still 10 to 15% overpriced, but that was based on the heady levels of artificially inflated neo-con economic irrationality. Thought of in the context of very high unemployment and general economic hardship, prices have to go down a lot more than that.

The punditry talks about the inevitability of boom and bust cycles: They are not inevitable. Ups and downs can not be avoided, but booms and busts are only part of the picture because of warped economic paradigms. Were subprime mortgages inevitable? Only because public policy made them so. If prevailing economic wisdom dictates that a government must do all in its power to maintain growth then there will certainly be extreme ups and downs.

The more frantically a government tries to push the economy upward, the more likely a serious crash on the downside, even though it may take a while. And it’s not like there’s no financial or monetary consequence when vast sums of money are expended on (ultimately futile) rescue and stimulus plans.

On the other hand, if the goal is long term stability and sustainability in a context of minimum income disparity (and no superwealthy) where every citizen has work to do and a home to live in, then there’ll never be another crash. The problem revolves around manic desire for growth.

Take Japan and Europe, for instance: There is constant lament over the very low growth rates they’ve been experiencing for a long time. But look more closely and you see mature and aging societies with stable or sometimes even declining populations.

Those kinds of societies have no reason to grow. Older people need and consume less with the exception of medical care. There’s no need to build a lot of new residential, commercial or government buildings in a stable population, only upkeep and a small amount of replacement is necessary. Infrastructure is largely in place, only maintenance is needed.

There is absolutely no reason for them to grow unless that growth involves societal advancements like renewable energy and conservation, more efficient transport, better educational and cultural opportunities; things that actually improve life and the environment. America needs some growth to provide for increasing population - entirely the result of immigration - and possibly to correct for extreme disparity in wealth, but to borrow and spend, to consume for its own sake - like building giant houses in the exurbs and manufacturing monster SUV’s to access those far flung mcmansions - is totally unnecessary, destructive and stupid.

Most important of all, now is not the time to pull back on tackling climate change because we somehow now can’t afford to. The extremely modest goals the world has set for itself will already have no impact whatever on the problem. They are only a start on a change of consciousness that will hopefully evolve into real progress on the matter; a change in thinking that might actually someday save the planet. The work that needs to be done to tackle the problem of global warming is the only kind of growth that makes sense.

The world cannot continue to increase its population and consumption and still survive. Fixation on growth must change. It is a theoretical impossibility that is nonetheless embraced by nearly all Serious thinkers and Important people.

The worldwide economic crash provides the opportunity to settle into a new, sustainable, lightly-living lifestyle; however, I am not optimistic. No matter how badly the Establishment has fucked up the world, they will insist that their way is the only way to right it; obviously a ridiculously inane conclusion.

Many people over the world are going to suffer tremendously from this man-made disaster, we can only hope against hope it isn’t totally in vain.

It may even be possible that the poor, who have not existed in American political discourse since Reagan, will actually have their needs considered again. If that does happen it’ll only be because a lot of formerly middle class people find themselves heading towards the bottom.

Meanwhile we can try to suspend our disbelief that the feckless, spineless, close to worthless Democratic Party will somehow find the will to do at least some permanent good – like universal health care, regulation of the financial sector and building of sorely needed infrastructure. The Dems haven’t had a leader with the guts to stand for anything for a long time. Will Obama stand up to the plate, play that role, come through for America and the world?

McCain Bounces

McCain Bounces

What to make of the McCain bounce in the polls? Not much, it’s way too early to fret. Thoroughly frightening prospect, though, nonetheless.

I love the way the Repug’s convention was centered on bringing “change” to Washington, as if they hadn’t been in power (or aided in their destructions by their fawning consorts in the so-called opposition party) for most of recent history. When 80 percent of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction and a mere 25% approve of the president’s job they have to do their best to flee reality.

And Sarah Palin, beauty-queen mayor of a town under 10,000 less than two years ago, supposedly ready to take the reins of power from a geezer with a sketchy medical history, doesn’t know much about Iraq because she’s been busy with Alaskan issues. Maybe she’s a fast learner, or maybe the Rovian wrecking crew, thinks it can sufficiently manipulate her if the geezer pops a fuse.

Ah but the media love her. Though she’s railed against sex education, because abstinence-only is the sole legitimate moral position a rightwingnut conservative Christian political leader can take, she’s now hailed as courageous for standing by her knocked-up teenage daughter - who obviously didn’t get the message. She’s suddenly become a liberal, at least this time, at least in the context of her own family. Very similar to “family-values” Repugs caught soliciting sex in public bathrooms, life has intruded into her regressive bygone-era ideology.

Meanwhile, Obama says family is off-bounds. If he loses it’s because he’s too good. This is more than family, this is public policy that leaves many less fortunate teenagers in dire straits. The Repugs gleefully berate minority teen mothers as promiscuous and deserve to be called up on their duplicity and hypocrisy.

Meanwhile Obama has humanized himself by taking some truly awful stands, especially his capitulation on the FISA – Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – spying bill. The court was set up twenty or so years ago in response to illegal warrantless spying on international communications by federal agencies. Out of more than 19,000 applications for spying received by the court during its tenure, only a handful were refused. The government was even allowed to do the surveillance for 72 hours before it was required to get approval.

This wasn’t good enough for Bush so he got congress to give the government unlimited powers to spy on international communications. Obama obviously thought he needed to fold his principles – he had previously opposed the changes – for political reasons. I believe he lost more fervor from his strongest potential supporters than he might have gained from a few undecideds.

I caught most of the Dem convention while back in the states. A lot of populism was on display and a lot of talking about real people, elements that were sorely lacking in the Gore and Kerry campaigns until too late. Both losers, and they were truly lousy candidates whatever you think about them as individuals, started their runs thinking the bushman was so bad they couldn’t lose for trying.

Nonetheless, it’s important noting that, in spite of their monstrous failings and the general worthlessness of the Democratic party, they both, in fact, did win their elections only to have them stolen. While fraud has been reduced in some states, the bottom line is that Obama has to win by a large margin or the thievery of the last two presidential elections will be repeated.

Obama has been amazingly deferential toward Hillary, even bordering on obsequious, in spite of her nasty, futile campaign and childish whining about how the world was so unfair towards her. She could’ve won the nomination with better organization and a smarter strategy, but she was outmaneuvered fair and square, by, in my estimation, a much better candidate.

Meanwhile the BarryO, who sometimes seems almost a transcendent being, heaped so much praise on Hillary it almost made me gag, but effectively mollified her and Bill and got them on the proper political track: Was she going to take her marbles and sit out the election or help elect the geezer? Impossible.

While Obama’s mantle of above-it-allness has been strained by some of his recent positions and the reality that he is a Democrat, and thus beholden in many of the same ways to the same corporate controllers as the Repugs, he remains far superior to any candidate for president in a long time. In office I believe he’ll listen and learn and more often than not steer the correct course.

Unfortunately, he’ll not be able to accomplish the bulk of his promises, partly because the Republicans have left the country in such a sorry state of debt and debility and partly because his pledge to lower taxes on everyone earning less than $250,000 per year, now supposedly middle class, cannot possibly leave sufficient resources to right the country’s course. Raising taxes on the wealthy is a proper beginning but it can never be enough to reduce the deficit and pay for the infrastructure and development changes that must be done to meet the challenges of the near future. That’s going to have to come from everyone but the poorest.

Almost every speaker at the Dem convention spoke of conversion to sustainability, a far cry from the past when the subject rarely surfaced - even from Al Gore during his run. Obama is proposing a ten year $150 billion program for alternate energy programs. While far greater than anything that’s been done in the past, it’s only about 10% of what will actually be needed to save the US from economic disaster and the world from the worst of climate change.

It’s a good start, but honestly, starts are not enough; yet proposing an adequate program would be unthinkable politically and financially. Will he respond sufficiently at points of crisis when hard-boiled reality on the ground meets his politically plausible but woefully inadequate previous stands? That’s our only reasonable hope.