Is this what ecocide looks like?

Ecocide is defined as murder of the environment. It is now happening and its being broadcast 24/7. I consider myself someone who can steel myself to view unpleasant things if I have to. But I cannot look at another miserable, dying, oil soaked pelican such as this. The horror show coming out of the marshes and beaches comprising the Mississippi Delta and the adjacent states has become unbearable. I grew up on the west coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico so I feel a special affinity for that body of water - swimming, fishing, snorkeling (and getting sunburned) there. It is absolutely heartbreaking for 50 days and counting to see on the news the grainy live image of ugly black matter uncontrollably spewing forth cloud-like, raw petroleum that was once safely sealed a mile below the sea in a layer of solid rock now gushing out uncontrollably destined to turn huge swathes of the Gulf into dead zones and poison the largest wetland in North America.

This count of days of unabated oil flow is mounting. And it is moving Barack Obama into hapless Jimmy Carter territory. President Jimmy Carter, also a ‘centrist’ Democrat, and also one prone to listening to the centrist Washington consensus including his hawkish National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was Brzezinsk who no doubt encouraged him to allow the disgraced Shan of Iran into the US for medical care when Iran was on the brink of revolution. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards countered by seizing all the employees of the US embassy and keeping them for over a year, until his right wing successor, one Ronald Reagan, negotiated their release. The whole affair totally undermined the Carter presidency as the iconic image of a blindfolded captive American with the numbers of days held so far was shown daily in the national media. Every added day of captivity served to underline in the public’s mind of Carter’s profound ineptitude.

Let’s hope that does not happen to Obama. Let’s hope Obama will not be forever remembered for this monumental environmental catastrophe - that keeps getting worse. If only Obama had learned from the health care reform debacle not to bargain with the ‘corporatocacy.’ But since the whole health care reform effort, once so close to total collapse, finally passed, it was interpreted by him, his staff and the corporate media as “a success.”

Apparently those early deals and sell-outs to the corporate health insurance kingpins and pharmaceutical oligopolies was to serve as a model for the upcoming climate bill struggle in Congress. So Obama several months ago announced that he was in fact supportive of ‘offshore drilling.’ In hindsight what a monumental blunder! Already he was making nice to the Energy-Industrial Complex and the Republican (and Demo) carbon based energy troglodytes in Congress and was perversely embracing his former arch-enemies’ mantra – ‘drill, baby, drill.’ This was of course a huge disappointment to the environmentalist community who had strongly supported Obama. Obama’s appointment of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, who had a mixed record on environmental issues, was already been a bad sign. So it was not totally a surprise that Obama would equivocate on offshore drilling. But this typical act of ‘splitting the difference’ with his opponents on the right has now bit him on the ass big time. It has totally undercut his moral authority on this issue as he stands in his rubber boots in a huge, nasty, ever-growing puddle of crude oil mixed with salt water containing dead birds and rotting fish. Indeed he is up to his knees in it. He has truly stepped into some shit!

Had he done the right thing and continued to oppose offshore drilling as he had during his campaign for the presidency, his standing now would be so much better. Had he remained opposed to offshore drilling even as there had been no serious underwater drilling spills in US waters in over 40 years (not since Santa Barbara in 1969) and even as a majority of Americans supported offshore drilling (who foolishly believe it will lead to cheap gas at the pump), he would in so much better shape. He would have a stone solid "I told you so! to throw back at the Repubs. But now the whole thing has made him look like a fool and exposed his strategy vs. the GOP as a peremptory sell out to Big Oil. Furthermore, he simply now looks helpless as BP continues to call the shots and control the information and fails to staunch the bleeding. Sure he now can call for drilling moratoriums, etc. Sure he can now call for reorganization of the pathetically inept and corrupt Minerals Mgt. Service (why didn’t Ken Salazar clean house there as soon as he got in?) And can sympathize until he’s blue in the face with the victims of this “Korporate Katrina’ but it’s too fucking late in so many ways. Even it the oil flow is stopped tomorrow, the damage environmentally and politically is done.

Many are calling for a new Obama to rise phoenix-like from this oil sump and declare a no-holds-barred FDR style a new 100 days of job creating environmental and infrastructure overhaul in concert with a real and robust effective new energy initiative that would be a model for the entire world. Let the Tea Party fools, who will call him a socialist and a left wing radical anyway, go bananas for a good reason. Why not really kick some ass? Not just BP’s ass, the obvious target, but the whole complex network of corporate slimelords who would (and are) feeding like vultures on this dying planet and it’s population - human, plant and animal.

A new ragdoll to gnaw on

We need a new ragdoll to gnaw on now that health care reform legislation finally passed, although it sure is far less than it could have been. As far as I can tell it contains no real means to keep health insurance rates down. Then there was tactical surrender on the Hyde amendment so that health insurance offered on the exchanges cannot include abortion coverage. And of course meds bought through Medicare will continue to be the full non-negotiated retail price. Also it turns out the insurances companies’ punishment for dropping people when they get really sick apparently is a mere wrist slapping. But at least many more people will have some level of care so they won’t suddenly show up at the ERs around the country desperately sick and uninsured. Everyone will be able to get see a doctor early on before it’s too late. And importantly the mad dogs in the Republican Party cannot claim victory thus beginning a bloody feeding frenzy on the remains of Obama’s reform agenda.

The new ragdoll for the media’s talking heads to growl over and chew on and pull apart is now ‘financial reform.’ The big boyz on Wall Street and their hotshot lobbyists and their $1000 dollar an hour lawyers must be gobbling down piles of Adderall hoping to conjure up some fine new ideological justification for keeping their no-holds -barred Greed Arena (AKA Wall Street) up and running. (One argument might be if you are smart enough to understand some of the more esoteric financial derivatives, then you deserve to be rich.) No one regardless of their politics likes the idea of these guys emerging from the partially reconstructed ruins of a crashed world economy even richer, an economy that they brought down, especially since the taxpayers (some now unemployed and/or ex- homeowners) and their children and their children’s unborn children had to ‘front’ the banks an astronomical sum to bail them out (and to presumably 'unfreeze credit' worldwide.)

Otherwise what? Full scale global Economic Armageddon or merely a winnowing out of the losers. We will never know – until the next time. Naturally the Repubs, even as most of them voted for the bail out, are now conveniently taking a full-on lassez faire libertarian view that the banks should have been allowed to fail even if all hell broke loose as it did in the 1930s – ‘creative destruction’ and all that.

The Wall Streeters emerging from all of this richer than Crocus is like the captain of the Titanic being awarded a shiny gold medal for hitting an iceberg (or GW Bush’s handing out Freedom metals to the architects of the Iraq debacle.) It turns out the ‘masters of the universe’ combined income for 2008 is twice the size of the debt of the a now bankrupt entire country, Greece, which apparently gorged itself with now worthless bonds at the urging of its investment bankers Goldman and Sachs (see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone.) Since teabaggers and lefties alike are pissed, for once the Demos and GOP are forced to come together on something – but what? That remains to be seen.

The pols are arguing over issues that manner greatly - such as whether to reinstate Glass Stegall, an effective Great Depression era law that imposes a firewall between old fashioned commercial and freewheeling investment banks, controlling derivatives by making them more transparent and subject to monitoring, breaking up the monster banks that can bring down the entire global world capitalist order if they fail and giving financial consumers some kind of regulatory protection. Other ideas include, taxing speculation to reign in the hot money that fuels volatility in critical commodities (like oil) as well as currencies (that can bankrupt whole countries.) Another problem is the inherent corruption of paid-for bond rating services such as Standard & Poors and Moodys. Triple AAA rated bonds turned out to be actually to be triple AAA rated dogshit because the bonds’ ratings were paid for by the very outfits floating the bonds. Nice huh?

To further muddy things up the financial big boys gave lots of money to Obama’s campaign. And Obama has seen fit to staff his economic team with Goldman Sach friendly Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s whose key aide is from Goldman Sachs. And of course Obama signed on to the big bank bail-out called TARP devised by ex-Goldman Sach CEO and GW Bush’s Sec of the Treasury, Henry Paulson. But now with Demos are on the move in a regulatory mood with the wind at their back, Wall Streeters have slid their bets over to the GOP side.

So with the GOP setting themselves up to carry the water for the Wall Streeters it should be interesting to see how they manage things. The populace politically right, left and center really do want the bankers reigned in (and maybe punished a little to boot, like hung from the nearest lamp post.) So far it looks like we are going to see a rerun of their health care bill strategy, that is the GOP by dicking around and stalling and undermining things in general will make sure what does emerge is a big fat toothless dogturd.

Will it work again? Will the home of the endless filibuster threat continue live on in perpetuity, the land where a democratic majority equals 41%? The American people are so seriously bifurcated that whatever intellectually dishonest, disingenuously brilliant points the Repubs make combined with whatever valid concerns they raise will be lost in windstorm of left and right oriented cable ‘news’ - hype, rabid overstatement, pundit grandstanding and spinmiester bullshit.

In any case, no one has any real answer as to how to deal with a US economy that now runs on essentially fictitious capital, where profits are made from instruments that generate monetary value but no actual utility. Increasingly the economy has become dependent on casino-like speculation driven by so called ‘markets’ (often manipulated as we see with Goldman Sachs shorting its own product.) Fifteen years ago, the assets of the six largest banks in this country totaled 17 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The assets of the six largest banks in the United States today total 63 percent of GDP. And that’s just the largest ones, what about adding in the rest? Now it’s all about finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE.) We don’t actually manufacture that much anymore. No wonder we have nearly 10% unemployment. There are few factories left. They all went east young man, Far East. From these figures, 63% of the GDP, it seems to mean the banks are ‘producing’ 2/3’s of everything. But what comprises this 63%? Aren’t these assets valued at what the banks says they are valued at and include all kinds of toxic CDOs and whatever, assets that contain ‘tranched’ that is embedded mortgages that are now ‘underwater’ but haven’t been defaulted on yet? Remember the banks weaseled out of ‘mark to market’ valuation of their assets awhile back. As far as I can see it will take a revolution to reign in these bastards, but I hope it’s not the kind the teabaggers have in mind…

Cutting off noses to spite faces

The always fickle, emotional and often ill-informed (read: easily fooled) ‘swing voters’ of Massachusetts have sliced off their noses to spite their faces. Unhappy with things in general (aren’t we all) double digit unemployment, rich pig bankers getting richer after crashing the economy, an ever growing trillion dollar federal deficit, two wars - no waiting, spineless soft ball playing Democrats, etc., etc) decided to show their displeasure by voting in a Republican as their new senator. They must have been aware by voting for pretty boy Brown it would ruin the (so-called) filibuster proof majority in the Senate and throw a large nasty monkey wrench into the protracted and convoluted negotiations for much needed national heath care reform. Massachusettians already have a state universal health care, in fact one very much like the one that was emerging from Congress. So their message to the rest of the country – screw you, we got ours!

If there were general dissatisfaction with the state program, it would have made sense. But that wasn’t the case. Polls show that Massachusettians are more or less satisfied with it despite all of its shortcomings. They were just pissed in general (as we all are.) The fake populist, pseudo libertarian “teabagger” Repub party staged spectacles must have resonated with these airheads. Presumably the same crew that voted in Obama last fall must have turned on him and his hapless party in Congress and voted for the polar opposite. Very stupid! If Obama’s overly optimistic campaign promises made sense to them in November of 2008, that is his intention to clean up, or try to, the pile of elephant shit left behind by Bush and the Repub’s eight long miserable years of misrule, why show dissatisfaction by voting in a member of the same gang that fucked things up in the first place? It just shows that the voters don’t know what they want, except they want things to change. Apparently they think some handsome male model type in shining armor will ride in on a white horse and rescue them from “the dragon” (the dragon being: the Socialist Obama?, the Democrats?, the economy?, what?) As usual it’s all about glib style and well-crafted bullshit.

Of course, there is more to this than just ill informed, vindictive ‘swing voters’ turning on their latest savior. The performance of the Obama administration has been a big letdown for us all. With everything going for him: majorities in both houses of Congress, enthusiastic support, a discredited opposition and a clear mandate for change, he got bogged down and outflanked by a rat pack of naysayers on the right. No one expected him to be a closet radical that would suddenly tear off his rubber mask and be Che Guevera or even just a real reformer like either of the two Roosevelt’s. But geeze no one expected him climb into bed with the bankers, or invite big pharma and the health insurance industry to help fix something that was already working very well for them, thank you.

No one liked the big piece of dog doodoo that was poised to be passed. What’s not to like? - mandated health insurance with no controls on the for-profit health insurance companies from continuing raising premiums. Any “public option’ controls gone – too “socialistic.” And to pay for helping people who can’t afford this mandated insurance, the people (mostly upper middle income and union members) who have so-called “Cadillac” plans, they will see an ugly increase in premiums due to a new excise tax. Plus lots of sleazy backroom deals to buy votes from Democrat turncoats (AKA “Bluedogs) who should instead have been simply threatened with being cut off from party support come next election not fucking pandered to (Harry Reid is such a wimp.) But some needed reforms did survive to sugarcoat this bitter pill – no dumping people when they need insurance the most or precluding people who have preexisting conditions. Plus health care reform simply needs to be done. As we know the uninsured when very sick or seriously injured now just show up at ERs, and the hospitals fold this major cost into their overall fee structure thus driving up the costs in general including Medicare. Plus hundreds of thousands suffer and die from preventable conditions. Is the US or some banana republic?

Obama’s defensive, overly cautious, naively bipartisan approach was dead wrong. He needed to come out swinging. The old ‘best defense is a strong offense’ was called for. Sure he was a ‘centerist’ even as people like me wanted to believe he was on our side, the mostly ’left of center’ of Democrats (most Demos are.) The people who worked their asses off to get him elected, the college kids who naively thought he was the Second Coming, the union members, the old ‘new left’ from the Sixties, in short his base was always far to left of him on most issues. But his intelligence, rhetorical gifts and calm demeanor under fire was a welcome relief from his inept and reactionary predecessor. And the sheer magnitude and interlocking complexity of the problems he faces as President arw awesome to say the least. But he keeps disappointing us, and apparently the liberal leaning electorate of Mass.

There is a single payer health care system in ever other industrialized county in the world and we have to settle for this Rube Goldberg clunker. Clipped and chipped away it was plan only a loyalist Democrat Party hack of the first order and a health insurance company executive could love. So no doubt many regular Democratic voters in Mass sat this one out. And an impending tax on so-called “Cadillac plans, the generous health plans that unions had negotiated in good faith in lieu of cost of living wage increases no doubt kept many union members home.

Something is very wrong. Maybe this is how it feels to be living in an empire as it begins its slow decent into a second tier status. The voters swing wildly back and forth between two presumably ideological opposing parties. To borrow from Keats “the center cannot hold.” Our two parties are in reality simply equally ineffective gangs of opportunists shilling for the corporate rich, each capitalizing on the other’s failures as they take turns in the drivers seat. This while everything for most people gets slowly, inexorably worse. And running in background out of view like a multitasking operating system, the real rulers, the ultra rich, the corporate ruling class quietly calls the shots which are always aimed at retention of their power, their wealth and their privilege, this regardless of the cost to rest of us - socially, economically, environmentally.

Let’s hope this Massachusetts thing will give Obama and his inner circle a jarring shock. Let's hope they start listening to the people instead of continuing to take their marching orders from the millionaires and billionaires. Remember he's got three more years!

The Obama Hopemobile

Will we see a complete breakdown of the Obama Hopemobile (not to be mistaken for the Popemobile) by summers end? The collective anxiety of all who still retain a smidgen of faith in the Democratic Party is tangible. From the newspapers columnists, to the jabberwocky TV talking heads, to the windbag scribblers (like yours truly) producing unread (and unreadable?) blogs - everyone is watching and waiting. The whole idea that we can elect someone as our El Presidente and that one person will miraculously “fix things” is actually pretty naive. Barack Obama, the best of the litter, in terms or electable pols, had fashioned over time a political persona well to the right of any thinking person’s views - professional reactionaries (right wing talk show hosts, Fox TV performers and so-called "conservative pundits") excluded. If the truth were known on most issues I’m sure Obama would prefer a position well to the left of where he stands. But as his erstwhile minister, Reverend Wright, said as Obama skedaddled away from is former views, “what do you expect, he’s a politician.” He had to create an electable entity. A Ralph Nader or a Dennis Kucinich position on the issues would have doomed his enterprise from the start. We know that in order to be taken seriously by the managers of the hegemony, ‘acceptable positions’ on the issues must be assiduously taken.

We have grown weary of expecting much. We are so conditioned to seeing good ideas shrunk down and beaten into mush. And if anything requires courageous confrontation with the imposing and powerful corporate forces, forget it (read: a Single Payer plan was never even discussed in polite company.) If anything requires a breathtaking break with the past, a past that has failed us dismally, forget it. If anything requires exposure of the drooling, corrupt, reactionary, power hungry pack of hacks that hide behind the label Republican Party, forget it. Anyone with a grain of objectivity and the wits of an intelligent 12 year old knows that things are in a rapidly accelerating downward vortex – the US economy, global capitalism, the environment, the water supply, the weather. For christ’s sake we wont’ be able a get fish sandwich in couple of years if the world’s fisheries keep collapsing.

The US spends the most per-capita on health care of any country in the world and yet we are 32nd in infant mortality (UN statistics) well behind our long-time nemesis Cuba at 28th. As the recession grinds on and layoffs continue thousands lose their health insurance every day. 46 million of us wing it without any health insurance at all, knowing full well if we get seriously ill or get racked up bad in an accident, we are up Poop Creek big time. And yet it seems all heaven and hell is aligned against Obama getting even a modest and conservative plan intact through Congress.

And the plan that is being offered is indeed modest to a fault. The money machines, called health insurance companies, are being left intact - free to bamboozle and gouge again. The various others industries that make up the vast resource-gobbling medical-industrial complex that have morphed into virtual vampires are free to keep on sucking. The docs’ comfortable 6 and 7 figure incomes are not at risk. No, nobody as far as it now looks is going to take much of haircut on this. In fact that’s its key weakness - it’s going to cost a lot of money. In fact it's being deemed as “too expensive” especially for the right wing of Obama’s own Democratic Party, the Blue Dogs, who had no trouble voting for George W. Bush’s (a Prez from the opposition party no less) ‘supply side’ baloney tax cut for the rich, or for two wars - one totally unfounded and un-funded.

Only a small brave contingent of members of Congress were ever interested in discussing a real plan, a plan like every other industrialized country has – a Single Payer system. This would mean clearing the table of all the greed heads and parasites, and starting over. It would also mean doing what we are already doing for the senior citizens with Medicare, having the government take over the insurance side. We already have “medical socialism.” It’s called Medicare and Medicaid – for the old and for the (very) poor. With Single Payer the delivery would stay the same but all the payments would go through one big not-for-profit insurance company, the US government. I never hear the oldsters complaining about the “rationing of health care” under Medicare. But that said, some way to ‘de-incentivize’ gaming the system is crucial. Medicare works but costs way too much. And drives up the cost of the entire system. This is because Medicare t is based on fee-for-service not final outcomes. The more service rendered the more money collected. And forget Medicaid, it’s a loser because it relies half on the states. So it’s not uniform. Poor states provide poor coverage. The poor always get the feces dipped end of the stick. But Medicare is different. Everybody if they live long enough is entitled to it. It has been called the Cadillac of health care. But it costs us as taxpayer’s a fortune. It is not actuarially sound. It needs to be reworked, will have to be reworked even if Obama's initiative fails. When the baby boomers all become eligible, Medicare costs will knock us for a loop. The way Medicare is structured everybody has an incentive to maximize service, the suppliers, the providers, the users. And all of this is circumscribed in a law suite rich arena with malpractice lawyers waiting on the sidelines like vultures for the occasional (or not so occasional) error or adverse outcome that can be interpreted as an "error." So expensive tests and others services are maximized both for pecuniary reasons and to fend off potential malpractices suites. And then there is the expensive malpractice insurance that physicians must carry.

The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has announced the Senate will fail to deliver a bill by their August recess. As I write this, the whole thing is tied up the Senate Finance Committee (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/us/politics/28baucus.html?hp) chaired by one Sen. Max Baucus from a big but unimportant, conservative, under populated western state - Montana. Baucus is known as a Blue Dog Democrat, a term meaning he is essentially a Republican calling himself a Democrat. The lack of unity of Democrats on this centerpiece issue is pathetic. Letting a small contingent of center-right Democrats hold all that has been already hashed out hostage is beyond tragic. How does this shit happen? The Blue Dogs essentially buy the arguments of the Republicans most of who would like nothing better than the whole thing to collapse into a pile of broken pieces as did the Clinton plan of ’92. The Blue Dogs allied with the Republicans are opposing the fundamental cost control mechanism, a government run option, that would compete with and corral in the money machine health insurance plans. They, the Blue Dogs, good “Republicans” that are see it as is “too socialistic.” Furthermore the Blue Meanies think it should be funded by those who already have health insurance, by reducing existing tax deductions. They are opposed to increasing the tax on the upper income biggies ($250,000 per year and up) whose after-tax income has skyrocketed in the previous Bushian era.

At lot hangs in the balance but at this point it doesn’t look good. Any bill that emerges will be a target rich environment for the mob of Red Meanies (Repubs) that want it to fail (or even worse are afraid it might actually work.) It could fail in two other ways, too: either being too comprised and watered down to get support from those who have carefully championed this for so long, the progressive and majority wing of the Democratic Party or Obama, himself. Or it gets rammed through but it’s a stinker and fails to perform because of its own internal contradictions - another way the Repubs could win big.

The problem is the Democrats in general and Obama and Harry Reid specifically are not big on playing hardball. That’s the one thing the Republicans have going for them, they are absolutely ruthless - they love hardball, and could care less about collateral damage or the truth.