“Democrats Against Reform”: Democrats Should Be Celebrating The Fact That They Did The Right Thing
It’s easy to understand why Republicans wish health reform had never happened, and are now hoping that the Supreme Court will abandon its principles and undermine the law. But it’s more puzzling — and disturbing — when Democrats like Charles Schumer, senator from New York, declare that the Obama administration’s signature achievement was a mistake.
In a minute I’ll take on Mr. Schumer’s recent remarks. But first, an update on Obamacare — not the politics, but the actual policy, which continues to rack up remarkable (and largely unreported) successes.
Earlier this week, the independent Urban Institute released new estimates of the number of Americans without health insurance, and the positive results of Obamacare’s first year are striking. Remember all those claims that more people would lose coverage than would gain it? Well, the institute finds a sharp drop in the number of uninsured adults, with more than 10 million people gaining coverage since last year. This is in line with what multiple other estimates show. The primary goal of health reform, to give Americans access to the health care they need, is very much on track.
And while some of the policies offered under Obamacare don’t offer as much protection as we might like, a huge majority of the newly insured are pleased with their coverage, according to a recent Gallup poll.
What about costs? There were many predictions of soaring premiums. But health reform’s efforts to create meaningful competition among insurers are working better than almost anyone (myself included) expected. Premiums for 2014 came in well below expectations, and independent estimates show a very modest increase — 4 percent or less — for average premiums in 2015.
In short, if you think of Obamacare as a policy intended to improve American lives, it’s going really well. Yet it has not, of course, been a political winner for Democrats. Which brings us to Mr. Schumer.
The Schumer critique — he certainly isn’t the first to say these things, but he is the most prominent Democrat to say them — calls health reform a mistake because it only benefits a minority of Americans, and that’s not enough to win elections. What President Obama should have done, claims Mr. Schumer, was focus on improving the economy as a whole.
This is deeply wrongheaded in at least three ways.
First, while it’s true that most Americans have insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, and employment-based coverage, that doesn’t mean that only the current uninsured benefit from a program that guarantees affordable care. Maybe you have good coverage now, but what happens if you’re fired, or your employer goes bust, or it cancels its insurance program? What if you want to change jobs for whatever reason, but can’t find a new job that comes with insurance?
The point is that the pre-Obamacare system put many Americans at the constant risk of going without insurance, many more than the number of uninsured at any given time, and limited freedom of employment for millions more. So health reform helps a much larger share of the population than those currently uninsured — and those beneficiaries have relatives and friends. This is not a policy targeted on a small minority.
Second, whenever someone says that Mr. Obama should have focused on the economy, my question is, what do you mean by that? Should he have tried for a bigger stimulus? I’d say yes, but that fight took place in the very first months of his administration, before the push for health reform got underway. After that, and especially after 2010, scorched-earth Republican opposition killed just about every economic policy he proposed. Do you think this would have been different without health reform? Seriously?
Look, economic management is about substance, not theater. Having the president walk around muttering “I’m focused on the economy” wouldn’t have accomplished anything. And I’ve never seen any plausible explanation of how abandoning health reform would have made any difference at all to the political possibilities for economic policy.
Finally, we need to ask, what is the purpose of winning elections? The answer, I hope, is to do good — not simply to set yourself up to win the next election. In 2009-10, Democrats had their first chance in a generation to do what we should have done three generations ago, and ensure adequate health care for all of our citizens. It would have been incredibly cynical not to have seized that opportunity, and Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing.
And one related observation: If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they’ve done in decades, rather than run away from their own achievement and implicitly concede that the smears against health reform were right, the politics of the issue might look very different today.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 4, 2014
“The Only Way To End Police Violence”: Convince Americans That Their Lives Truly Matter
Here’s something one is not supposed to say at a time like this, but it’s true and we all know it’s true, so let’s say it: There will be more Eric Garners; more Michael Browns. There will be, it’s sad to say, piles more of these dead, black, male bodies, and dozens or hundreds more white police officers walking away from the inconvenience of having added to the pile, for the simple and obvious reason that our political system and our culture have neither the will nor the capacity to ensure that there won’t be.
This is also usually when we pause to take note of the great racial progress we’ve made in this country over the last two generations, while adding dutifully and ruefully that there is still much more to do. We’ve made progress for sure. But on the criminal justice front, we’ve gone backwards. The harsh sentencing laws passed from the 1970s through the 1990s have seen to it that one out of three black men in America will do some jail time at some point in his life. If Putin did that with one of his ethnic minorities, we’d be calling him a greater monster than Stalin.
The dollar value of a statistical life in the United States is purported to be around $5 million. That’s what safety analysts say. Of course that dollar value, callous as it may seem, is based on certain inputs—a person’s education, her earnings, her contributions to community and society. But if that’s the average, what’s a young black male life worth in the United States? Is it worth $1 million? Maybe $500,000? Michael Brown’s was apparently worth something closer to zero.
This is not going to change in America, at least for many, many years. Ask yourself: What would it take, really, for your average white cop not to see your average black male young adult as a potential threat? Because we can pass all the ex-post facto laws we want, and we can even convict the occasional police officer, which does happen from time to time. But that’s not where the problem starts. The problem starts in that instant of electric mistrust when the cop reaches for his gun, or employs a homicidal chokehold. That moment is beyond the reach of legislation, or of any punishment that arrives after the fact.
So to answer the question of what it would take—well, cops will make different and less deadly decisions in those fateful moments when they no longer reflexively see black males as a priori threatening figures. But there’s so much history and cultural DNA threaded into that reflex that it’s hard to see how it can change.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try things. But to me, we should be putting a lot more emphasis on the front end than the back end; that is, on prevention more than punishment. By which I mean, for example, the training, education, and screening of white cops who will be dealing regularly with black citizens.
Back when I was writing about New York City, I once participated in a public forum where I was one of the journalists questioning then-Police Commissioner Howard Safir. One of those big incidents—Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, I can’t remember which, and they happened every few months—had recently taken place. Others asked Safir about after-the-fact approaches—a stronger civilian complaint review board, for example, which had been kicking around at the time, or steeper departmental penalties.
I went in a different direction. I asked Safir whether the NYPD did any kind of racial screening of police academy hopefuls; any battery of psychological tests, say, designed to identify and weed out the potential bad seeds? He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no, either. He had no idea! The commissioner—no idea how or whether applicants were screened for racial biases. Now, I don’t know whether any such testing goes on today, but if it doesn’t, it should.
We could also try more integrated police forces. Things are better on that score in many cities than they were 30 years ago, but still woefully out of balance, especially in a city like Ferguson. So there are a few things we can do to try to prevent these tragedies.
But I doubt the political will exists for anything beyond the most transparently cosmetic changes, and at bottom the will is not there because not enough value is attached in American society to young black male lives. If more were, society would never stand for this. If someone out there with a passion for this issue and a couple billion dollars wants to work on a project, maybe it’s just this: Show Americans that young black men don’t have to be either hoodlums or rappers or occasionally actors, that they are just like young white men in their infinite variety, goodness, badness, talent, mediocrity, and decency. When they become simply human to the rest of America, that’s when America will do something to lessen the pile.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 5, 2014
“The Good Ol’ Boys Roundup”: It’s Not Just The Cops—Racism Is A Problem For The Secret Service, Too
The track record of the U.S. Secret Service in protecting President Barack Obama has come under intense scrutiny in recent months due to several major security lapses, the most recent of which prompted the resignation in October of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson.
A recently released Department of Homeland Security report about that incident determined that a number of “performance, organizational, technical and other” factors contributed to the security breach.
What is not mentioned in that DHS report is another long-running issue within the Secret Service—one which, according to several experts, creates the conditions for a breakdown in agency morale that could ultimately compromise the security of President Obama. That threat is embodied in a long-running lawsuit filed by a group of African-American Secret Service agents who allege the agency’s culture is replete with racism.
In September, a man with a knife scaled a fence and ran into the White House, making it as far as the East Room—it was this incident that prompted the report by DHS, which oversees the Secret Service. That same month, however, in Atlanta, the media reported that an armed security contractor with an arrest record was somehow allowed to ride in the same elevator as President Obama.
Those incidents echo an even more serious security breach that played out in 2011, when a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle managed to fire some seven bullets into the White House while one of the president’s daughters was home and the other expected to return that same evening—yet it allegedly took the Secret Service four days to determine the shots had been unleashed on the president’s home.
“If the black Secret Service agents’ legal claims related to racism in the agency are true, then there is a threat to the president’s security because he is a black man,” says Matthew Fogg, a retired chief deputy U.S. Marshal who in 1998 won a multimillion-dollar jury verdict in a racial discrimination lawsuit filed against his agency. “If they are treating black people differently, then how can that not affect the president?”
Fogg also is party to one of two pending class-action discrimination cases filed by black federal agents against the U.S. Marshals Service. The mere fact that the most qualified agents are not getting promoted within an agency due to racial factors—as is alleged in both the the Secret Service and U.S. Marshals litigation—indicates, Fogg says, that race is an issue in the quality of protection being provided to individuals, including the president.
Attorney Ronald Tonkin, a former federal prosecutor who now represents federal agents in whistleblower and employment-discrimination cases, says regardless of which side prevails in the Secret Service litigation, both the accused and accusers “are affected” by the resulting tension and polarization.
“These agents are all professionals, but the question is whether their professionalism is dissipated by a perception that they are being treated badly,” said Tonkin, who also serves as associate counsel for the National Association of Federal Agents. “It does, in my experience, have an effect on agency morale, and that affects performance at some level.”
The black Secret Service agents’ litigation, certified as a class-action lawsuit last year, has been pending in federal court since 2000 due to numerous procedural delays. It alleges that black agents, as a group, have been systematically discriminated against in hiring, assignments, transfer, awards, promotions and discipline.
“The Secret Service has failed to protect its African-American special agents from racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of their employment,” the black agents’ pleadings in the case allege. “Discrimination against African-American agents in the Secret Service has become part of the fabric of the agency and has spanned several decades.”
A complaint filed by the 10 black agents who are named plaintiffs in the class-action suit points to an event held in southeastern Tennessee called the “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup,” which was made public in the mid-1990s via media reports but had been staged annually since 1980.
“The racist conduct that occurred at the Roundup included the posting of racist signs like ‘Nigger checkpoint,’ a simulated lynching of a black man from a tree, and a host of racist skits and songs,” the complaint alleges. “Officials at the Secret Service knew about this event, and at least 30 Secret Service agents were documented attending the event. … Many of the white special agents who attended the Roundup were promoted to high-ranking positions in the Secret Service, including three agents who became SAICs [special agents in charge] of field offices … and two agents who were promoted to the Senior Executive Service level.”
Reginald Moore, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Atlanta field office, and a party to the black agents’ class-action lawsuit, declined to comment on the case or any potential threat to the president due to the alleged racism within the agency. Likewise, Angela Burns-Ramirez, a former Secret Service special agent who has an individual racial-discrimination complaint pending in federal court against the agency, declined to comment on the advice of her attorney. A primary allegation in her lawsuit, which mirrors claims raised in the Secret Service class-action litigation, is that she “has been treated differently and subjected to different terms and conditions of her employment due to her race (African American).
“Despite being established in 1865, the first African-American female was not promoted to a GS-14 [supervisory] position until 2001,” Burns-Ramirez’ court pleadings state. “Only five African-American females hold a rank higher than GS-14 within the Secret Service.”
Brian Leary, a spokesman for the Secret Service, declined to discuss the black agents’ class-action lawsuit or the impact their allegations might be having on the agency. “We aren’t commenting due to the ongoing nature of the lawsuit,” he said.
Professor Richard Delgado, the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, warns that it would be a mistake to discount the effect that racism can have on an institution and its ability to function effectively. Delgado is a leading scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, which focuses on the ways in which racism is embedded historically in the nation’s laws and legal system.
When racist activity is claimed, “it creates a terrible environment for both sides of the color line,” Delgado explained.
“For the minority agents who feel discriminated against, they feel unappreciated and develop a defensive attitude at best,” Delgado added. “Many of their white colleagues see the minority agents as troublemakers scheming to get ahead, talking to lawyers.
“Both sides are certain they are right, and it’s a recipe for morale problems or worse. It can lead to inattention on the job or even small acts of sabotage designed to make someone look bad.”
Delgado said he would not want to be “a federal official with an agency in that state charged with looking after my back.”
The solution in such a case, he said, isn’t simply to ask people to set aside their animosities, because “that doesn’t work.”
“The best course is to arrange a lot of contact early in life, so that blacks, whites and Latinos get to know each other and see we’re all humans with a range of behaviors and character, some good and some bad,” Delgado stressed.
“And these agencies should be screening people early, before they are hired, to determine if they, regardless of color, have the right attitudes and ability to work well in diverse groups.”
By: Bill Conroy, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2014
“Undermining The Sacred Right To Lie”: More Fun With Ben Carson’s Idea of “PC”
Back in October I stared at enough Ben Carson remarks to begin to grasp the man’s very unusual definition of “political correctness,” a term he uses constantly. To him, it basically means the practice of contradicting or mocking right-wing conspiracy theories in a way that “intimidates” people into no longer articulating them, which in turn suppresses political debate and thus makes America no longer America or something. So I wasn’t surprised when Carson went into full anti-PC mode after Wolf Blitzer (among others) called him on comparing the United States to Nazi Germany (per David at Crooks & Liars):
Possible Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson on Wednesday lashed out at CNN host Wolf Blitzer for “focusing on the words” that he used when he compared the United States to Nazi Germany.
Earlier this year, Carson had told the conservative news outlet Breitbart that the U.S. was “very much like Nazi Germany” because President Barack Obama was using the government to “intimidate the population.”
“What I heard the comparison of the United States of America — the greatest country in the world, the greatest country ever — to Nazi Germany, I said, what is he talking about?” Blitzer told Carson on Wednesday.
“See, what you were doing is allowing words to affect you more than listening to what was actually being said,” Carson insisted. “Nazi Germany experienced something horrible. The people in Nazi Germany largely did not believe in what Hitler was doing, but did they say anything? Of course not. They kept their mouths shut.”
“The fact that our government is using instruments of government like the IRS to punish its opponents, this is not the kind of thing, as far as I’m concerned, that is a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an American issue. This is an issue that threatens all of our liberty, all or our freedom.”
Blitzer, however, wasn’t satisfied: “But to make the comparison, Dr. Carson, to Nazi Germany, the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis, the devastation that erupted in Europe and around the world to the United States of America, I want you to reflect on what that means.”
“Well, again, you are just focusing on the words Nazi Germany and completely missing the point,” Carson replied. “And that’s the problem right now, that’s what PC-ism is all about: You may not say this word regardless of what your point is because if you say that word, you know, I go into a tizzy. We can do better than that.”
Read that through a couple of times and you get there’s no reasoning with people like Carson. Anyone who doesn’t accept his planted axiom that the IRS is being used as a political weapon by Obama (you know, through that well-known totalitarian tactic of slow-walking applications for a phony “social welfare” tax exemption designed to hide the identity of political donors) is smothering his argument with “political correctness.” Anyone hung up on the meaning of “words” like “Nazi” is undermining the sacred right to lie and make outrageous false analogies. Carson sees no obligation on his own part to be slightly more careful in his characterization of political opponents as akin to slave-drivers and Nazis. And so until people like him are, God forbid, fully in charge of America, any expression of dissent from his bizarre world-view is in fact oppressive, and any debate is the suppression of debate.
Yeah, the more I listen to him, the more it’s clear Dr. Ben Carson is the true and perhaps ultimate leader of the Post-Modern wing of the conservative movement, where “facts” are just an inconvenient artifice.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 4, 2014
“A Conspiracy So Vast, It Now Involves Republicans”: Republicans Turn On Each Other Over Benghazi Conspiracy Theories
Once the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee issued its report on the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, there was a sense of finality to the process. GOP lawmakers on the panel themselves described the findings as “definitive.”
Every possible question has been answered. Every conspiracy theory has been discredited. Every wild-eyed allegation has been proven false. Every House committee, every Senate committee, every State Department investigator, and every inquiry launched by independent news organizations have reached the exact same conclusion. There’s a general feeling, even among many Republicans, that it’s time to just move on.
But that’s not going to happen. Not only is the House on track to spend at last another $1.5 million – of our money – on yet another committee, but many GOP lawmakers have decided to reject the findings of other GOP lawmakers.
Some of the loudest torch-and-pitchfork wielding Benghazi investigation enthusiasts weren’t satisfied. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said on CNN he thought the report “is full of crap” and that the House Intelligence Committee had done a “lousy job of policing their own.”
“I’m saying that anybody who has followed Benghazi at all knows that the CIA deputy director did not come forward to tell Congress what role he played in changing the talking points,” Graham said. “And the only way we knew he was involved is when he told a representative at the White House, I’m going to do a hard review of this, a hard rewrite.” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) agreed, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that Graham “is probably right.”
He’s really not.
And while it’s certainly interesting to see Graham and Chaffetz reject the exhaustive findings prepared by their colleagues from their own party, no one seems quite as hostile to the evidence as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), arguably Congress’ most zealous conspiracy theorist.
The Kentucky Republican wrote an op-ed for a right-wing website this week, and I hope readers will take a moment to appreciate Rand Paul’s approach to logic in all its glory.
The Associated Press claims the report debunks, “A series of persistent allegations hinting at dark conspiracies, the investigation of the politically charged incident determined that there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.”
None of these accusations contain even a modicum of truth?
It’s important to appreciate Paul’s intellectual rigor: there are lots of allegations, and even though the evidence proves the allegations false, maybe, since there are so many of them, one of them is a little true?
As Simon Maloy noted, the Republican senator proceeded to suggest his own GOP allies may be “helping the Obama administration cover-up the truth about Benghazi.”
That’s right, it’s come to this: Republicans have uncovered a conspiracy so vast, it involves Republicans who went looking for evidence of a conspiracy.
I get the feeling that the Beltway media considers Rand Paul so “interesting” that his antics, no matter how ridiculous, simply cannot be disqualifying. But that’s a shame – his approach to Benghazi is itself a cringe-worthy embarrassment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 5, 2014
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