tales of copper city

Social policy: or everything is connected to everything else

I'm sure that most observers of the stimulus debate are aware of the shifting justification for public spending and public investment. 

Instead of basing these investments and stimulus spending on "health" or "education" or "jobs", the explanation is that it is all connected together. 

Eight years of tax cuts for the wealthy, an attack on Social Security, a major disaster of a prescription drug program for the elderly (with the cynical proviso that government cannot bargain for lower prices with the pharmaceutical industry), were based on core "market fundamentalism." 

The market is always right to Republican fundamentalists, and whenever you must wonder into entitlement land (as with Bush's Medicare drug program) you make sure that the resulting program expands the role of the private sector in the Medicare program.

Getting the privatization nose under the Medicare tent has been a long-time goal for Republicans. 

Bipartisan baloney

I've always thought that the Obama's insistence on bipartisanship is baloney.

The Republicans are not going to have any part of it, and the attempt to try and win concessions from them on key policy initiatives, from fiscal stimulus to health care reform, will produce fatal flaws.

The Republicans do not want government to work well for the middle class because they fear that then the middle class will be converted to a pro-government activism, and that will ruin them as a party.

This column by Paul Krugman about the dangers of doing too little to avert another depression is the most important warning Obama will get. If we try to compromise with Republicans on health care reform we will wind up with an expensive mess that gives us few controls for stopping the spiral of wasteful spending.

The Republicans do not wish us well.  They are captive to a right-wing ideology that, faced with what's going on now, will take us off the cliff. The rank and file Republican still feels we did the right thing on Katrina; New Orleans got what it deserved.

And if we go off a cliff in this recession, the Republicans will then  blame us and the media will give them equal time and the public may blame us too..

The challenge for Obama is not to win bipartisanship; it is to use this crisis to alter the fundamental categories of American politics, especially the politics of division that have bedeviled us for decades, divisions rooted race, in blaming government for everything, and using abortion, gender politcs, and war to distract us from our true problems here at home.

It's about time to get tough with Israel

It's time to lay our cards on the table with Israel. 

This remarkable admission by a former senior adviser to six state departments, Aaron David Miller.  Miller worked for 20 years at the Department of State.

We should make clear that we will support Israel in its genuine security interests.  But looking the other way on the settlement policy on the West Bank or cutting off economic aid to the residents of Gaza because Hamas is in power is morally indefensible and simply not in our security interests.