The one question to ask Republican friends

Do you believe in democracy? That's the question to ask Republican friends.

Many avowed conservatives will say "We're not a democracy. We're a constitutional republic." This is nonsense. True, America isn't a direct democracy, as ancient Athens was (if you didn't count its slaves). But of course we're a kind of democracy--as our Constitution mandates. "Democracy" doesn't mean "Direct Democracy." That's just one kind. We're a representative democracy--another kind, included in the basic dictionary definition of "Democracy."

Once you've batted down that detour, ask once again "Do you believe in democracy?"

This is crucial, because nearly all the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have demonstrated that they don't believe in democracy.

The Senate's 41 Republicans don't represent 41% of the voters. They represent about a third, due to the fact that Montana gets the same number of senators as California, and the most populous states (Texas notwithstanding) are mainly Democrat majority, while the least populous states (Delaware notwithstanding) are mainly Republican majority.

So now we have the disaster of one third of the American people being able to dictate legislation to the other two thirds. Nothing in the Constitution's careful set of checks and balances envisions or supports this kind of minority rule.

Do Republicans really believe it's better to have minority rule of this sort than for the other party to get to enact the legislation it was elected to enact?

Say you're a doctrinaire Republican--opposing "big government," deficit spending, expansion of the federal government, foreign involvements except when absolutely necessary, and social issues such as abortion.

Say the party in the majority would, given its way, enact legislation that goes against all of this.

Then would supporting your agenda and opposing theirs justify, in your mind, destroying our democratic form of government?

A key component of an advanced democracy is the losing side accepting defeat. The Republican Party leadership has decided not to do this. Gridlocking the United States Senate is just one example of this new policy--the policy of the permanent campaign, of demonizing the other side, of claiming that the Republican Party's ends justify the means now being used.

Remember the Republican reign of Congress from 1994-2006? Time after time they railed against Democrats using a lightweight version of the Republicans' gridlocking tactics, demanding that judicial confirmations and a lot more go to "an up or down vote." Now the Republicans have abused Senate rules about filibustering to block 70% of Democratic legislation and personnel confirmations. They're preventing over 2/3 of Senate work from reaching that "up or down vote."

So ask your Republican friends: "Do you believe in democracy? Because your party's leadership doesn't. And if you actually believe in democracy, pressure your party's leadership to follow suit and quit blocking everything."

Note that I'm not saying this because I want everything the Democratic Party wants. I don't, as this blog's other entries demonstrate. But I do want to live in a democracy, and I'm willing to pay the price of not getting what I want all the time in order to reap the benefits of living in a democracy. Are Republicans?

If not, they've morphed from a political party into a primitive tribe in which tribal loyalty trumps principles.

When China is #1, will they do better than we did?

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote an op-ed piece speculating on a few decades hence, when perhaps China will occupy the world position America does now. Here's my comment:

One phenomenon already evident in Southeast Asia is the presence of the Ugly Chinese. We've been to Bali half a dozen times in the last decade, and there the locals tell us that a group of Chinese tourists will go into, say, a batik shop, talk loudly with each other in the shop, trash the place by grabbing merchandise to inspect it, then tossing it in a heap, then offer the shopkeeper less than he paid for the merchandise himself and insult him in the process...After they've left, it takes the shopkeeper an hour to make his shop reader for business again.

The Balinese observe that the Chinese have no idea of "win-win" in bargaining. For them there is only win-lose. They win, you lose. And they don't think they've won unless they've basically humiliated you.

This is all a stereotype, of course. There are wonderful Chinese tourists in Bali. But enough of them behave the way I've described here to give them a bad rep with the locals, who find Americans--the ones who go all the way to Bali, at least--easy-going, cheerfully respectful of the locals, and always interested in getting to know them instead of just treating them like the help.

So there we're actually the Pretty Americans. And the Chinese exemplify the stereotype of American tourists that I've heard all my life (in America at least).

China has always been inward-looking, and as their exports of tainted products demonstrates, they tend to treat anyone they don't have a personal relationship with (including other Chinese) instrumentally.

They think we're immoral because we don't cheat on behalf of relatives, interestingly. This is why Costco warehouse stores in the U.S. now packages produce in more or less sealed packages--too many Chinese housewives were swapping, say, pears they didn't like for pears in other flats, then just grabbing pears from other flats and loading twice as many purloined fruits in their flat and shamelessly trying to check out with it. After many complaints, Costco now puts them under plastic and wrappers and whatnot in order to cope with this, um, cultural phenomenon.

So becoming good world citizens is going to come very hard for them, I predict. Especially since they take criticism badly. I'm guessing most of them have no idea what the locals think of them. Of course it's likely that they don't care either.

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Someone who read this in the NYT put a comment into my Avatar a right wing plot? piece (see below). He wanted to know where I got my point about Costco.

I got my general thoughts about Chinese cultural character from a fascinating book

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why.

Here's a teaser for that book: if you show a page with three pictures on it--of some grass,
a bird, and a cow--and ask the viewer which two of those three items seem to go together more, most Asians will say cow-grass, while most Westerners will say cow-bird. Read it to see why.

I got my observations about Costco from personal experience. I live in an area with a huge Asian population, including many recent immigrants, and I saw the Costco shenanigans time after time over a period of years--also the paucity of anyone else doing same. I complained to Costco myself, and I'm sure other shoppers did as well, since, unlike normal shoplifting, it was completely brazen. I think they thought "If there's no rule against it it's fine for me to do it."

Remember, from the Chinese viewpoint this is not dishonesty. It's just prioritizing those close to you over strangers. So from that viewpoint we're the immoral ones, since we don't normally cheat on behalf of relatives.

So rather than say they're dishonest, I'd say their priority stack is arranged differently than ours--and it behooves us to keep that in mind.

Is "Avatar" a left-wing plot?

Some of my conservative friends are reluctant to see Avatar because they don't want to financially support an anti-American Com-yew-nist movie where the bad guys are the white American military and the good guys are the pure-hearted natives.

Now it's true that "Avatar" has a simplistic good guys/bad guys plot.

But the military being pilloried isn't the military--it's mercenaries working as corporate goons.

And while the locals are shown sympathetically, so are five or so humans--Americans. Including the protagonist. Actually, the movie has much in common with "District 9" another science fiction film about corporate interests mistreating noble (once you get to know them) aliens. Ugly as toad road kill, but noble nonetheless.

But most ironically, the Com-yew-nist Chinese dictatorship has belatedly pretty much banned "Avatar"--because Chinese viewers are seeing it not as criticizing Americans or the American military, but as allegorically criticizing...the Chinese government, famous for ruthlessly expropriating local villagers' homes and lands on behalf of rich developers and industrialists.

So the American right wing fears the film China's dictators fear.

What does that tell you?

The American People are angry--and that understandable anger has been shaped and aimed

Liberal commentators have one thing in common with their conservative counterparts: while everyone talks about how angry "the American people" are--nobody talks about the tidal wave of right wing propaganda that has shaped and molded this anger--and directed it at the very people who are trying to save them, however imperfectly.

It helps the manipulators that today's economic issues are too complex for most voters to understand. That's the simple truth. No amount of "common sense" is going help Joe Lunchbox make sense of default credit swaps and the things hedge fund managers do to "earn" their hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars incomes (taxed lower than their secretaries, natch).

This propaganda campaign employs dozens of fake populists with daily talk shows that dominate AM radio, plus a "news" station whose tag line should read "What the foreign cullud man in the White House did wrong today." That includes Fox's faux straight news programs, by the way--not just the O'Reillys and Hannitys et al.

And it includes not just general-purpose denunciation & ridicule of everything any Democrat ever said and did (often accusing them of exactly what Republicans are doing)--we also have the spectacle of the healthcare denial industry spending $1.4 million a day to defeat any kind of healthcare reform.

Commentators talk about the Massachusetts Miracle and the Tea Parties and every other sign of public distress as if people just sat in their homes poring over the Senate healthcare bill, reading annotated copies of the Constitution, and studying the findings of www.politifact.com and www.factcheck.org (two reputable factchecking organizations)...all before forming their personal opinions.

If only.

In reality, opinions are formed before any facts are found. Then people look for "facts" to support their conclusions, and for ways to dismiss or downplay countervailing facts. What really affects them are media figures who look and talk like them--only better-looking, more nicely dressed versions of them--and ads and whisper campaigns that inflame their fears and angers and appeal to their inner 10 year old.

The people engineering this, like Karl Rove, are brilliant and amoral. (Does anything think Karl Rove is religious? Or shares any of the tastes of the Republican rank and file?)

They have achieved with words and images the subjugation of a people that once required militias with weapons to achieve.

It is irrational to assume that people are rational. Countless times I've seen smart people tie themselves in knots trying to reason with ranting bigots who are obviously innumerate and incapable of rigorous analytic thought. All you can tell such people is "go to a community college for a couple of years. Take statistics and basic science courses that teach scientific method before you write another opinion."

Rational people are fooled by these coached questioners--like the ones you find on newspaper website comment threads--because they've learned to parrot worthwhile terms like "junk science." Only they define "junk science" as any science whose conclusions they don't like.

At least half of the American people have been tricked by right wing propaganda. I concede that there's left wing propaganda out there as well--wielded especially well by public employee unions and organizations advancing some socioethnic group at public expense (such as the racist organization self-named "The Race"--only they translate that into Spanish so English speakers won't notice the racism).

But the left wing propaganda doesn't have the giant bullhorn provided by America's Angry Billionaire's Club, financed by people whose names you wouldn't recognize, but whose companies you would--entities like Walmart and Mars Candy, and major developers, and the people behind the Chamber of Commerce (which purports to represent small business but doesn't--just the biggest ones). There are dozens of lobbyists for every Congressman, and only a relative handful of them represent liberal causes. The rest--usually retired Congressmen--command humongous salaries paid for by the Angry Billionaire's Club.

So, yes, the American people are mad at Obama, and the Democrats, and Congress in general.

Now look behind the curtain. Please?

Time to fix the filibuster

Over the history of the filibuster, it had been used in extreme circumstances (from the minority's point of view), as a last-ditch effort. Most notably from Southerners trying to stop civil rights legislation.

Today the Republicans in the Senate use the filibuster for everything, routinely--aided by a recent Senate innovation that allows them to not actually filibuster, but simply to threaten one. Thus the filibuster has morphed from an emergency device to preserve minority rights to something close to minority rule.

I believe in minority political rights. During the Dark Ages (the Bush presidency and Republican Congress 2000-2006) the Democrats used it and I always thought "Great. The Founders wanted our democracy to be somewhat inefficient, to prevent mob rule." Moreso because during the Republican rule of the Senate, its majority actually represented some 15 million fewer voters than the Democratic "minority"--courtesy of the way the Electoral College gives, say, one Montana Republican voter the same say in picking a President as around 4 California Democrats.

But now the filibuster has become exactly what Alexander Hamilton predicted in his Federalist Papers:

"The history of every political establishment in which [a super-majority] principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder."

The Senate Democrats must confront the filibuster head on. The howls will be huge. And when the Republicans regain control of the Senate, as is historically inevitable sooner or later, they will use any new rules on us--ruthlessly.

So be it. Minority rights cannot be allowed to become minority rule, regardless of who's in the minority.

Looking at healthcare reform defeat

Today's New York Times' lead editorial urges the House to pass the Senate's healthcare reform bill. Here's my comment:

When Paul Krugman said the same thing a few days ago, most of the many comments posted by readers disagreed with this advice--both left wing and right wing.

The diatribes from the political left seemed to be written in total ignorance of what Americans outside of college towns think. And they seem to think Obama was made king of the country, able to make laws by snapping his fingers. The American presidency is closer to being an administrator with a bullhorn.

You know he wants a single payer system. You should know he's just as frustrated as you are by how far the Senate bill is from that. But he lives on this planet.

So it's the mild reforms of the Senate bill, or less, or nothing. Th-th-that's all, folks. And if we get nothing--which all this left-wing howling is helping guarantee--we'll probably get a Republican president in 2012. Followed by a 7-3 Supreme Court corporatist-activist majority. Want that? Keep it up. Karl Rove is cheering you on.

The diatribes from the right mostly assume that the American people are all against the total takeover of American healthcare by European socialist death panels.

Um, the Senate bill was never anything like a takeover, and the lobbyists who form the fourth branch of government have seen to it that it's even milder than it started. It's only socialisim in the sense that Rush Limbaugh and the rest have redefined "socialism" as "any kind of regulation whatsoever."

Of course total gummint takeover is just what the Healthcare Denial Industry has been spending over a million dollars a day to make Americans think Congress is cooking up.

Odd that the right wing comments on Krugman's op-ed piece never--not once--acknowledged that American public opinion has been molded by this $1.4M/day tidal wave of advertising, PR, whisper campaigns, sock puppet pundits and more--countered by a pathetic trickle of truth. I say truth because nearly every claim the Republican leadership has said about the Senate bill has been shown to be a baldfaced lie--according to rigorously nonpartisan fact checking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

I'm not saying Democratic leaders always tell the truth. They don't. And they've certainly been swayed by lobbying and by public opinion, despite that public opinion being based on well-financed, slickly disseminated lies.

But on healthcare reform the Democrats are saints next to the the Republicans.

I only take slight comfort from knowing that when healthcare reform is defeated by rigid left-wing idealists and foaming-at-the-mouth right wing nutjobs--many in both groups are going to wind up with their tails in a crack as a direct result of healthcare reform failing again.

I heard a caller on one right wing talk show say "I don't want to pay for someone else's pre-existing condition."

Wait'll it's you. And you wind up with one of those medical bankruptcies right wing nutjobs deny the existence of (along with all science whose findings they don't like).

It'll serve you right. So go ahead and gloat at the defeat Democrats are looking at now. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

About Replican and Democrat responses to the Supremes' overturning free speech limitations

1. Republican partisans equate Exxon Corporation with "citizens...banding together and putting up a message consistent with their beliefs," then go on to claim that the unions will be the primary beneficiaries of the Supremes overturning a century of precedents on political spending.

2. Democrats downplay union influence on elections and focus on the perfidy of big business. Some even propose impeaching Justice Roberts on the basis of him perjuring himself during his nomination hearings.

Viewing all this from the middle, I get the general impression that both sides have valid complaints about the other side--while often showing total blindness to the missteps and malfeasance of their own side.

Look at healthcare reform. Regardless of whether you love or hate the bills in Congress, public opinion has been molded by the health insurance companies "banding together" to spend 1.4 million dollars a day on advertising, lobbying, whisper campaigns and suchlike--most of which has been debunked by www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com, both with impeccable nonpartisan credentials.

There have been efforts to counteract all this, but they've been buried in an avalanche of money, same as the last time anyone tried to reform our healthcare system.

All this supports the Democrats' complaints about the GOP's Golden Rule: the ones with the gold make the rules.

But the Republicans have a point about the unions, though unions in general are a shadow of what they were a few decades ago. The exception is the public employee unions. Government employees now make, on average, 40% more than comparable private sector employees--and they have lifetime security, with fat pensions, healthcare benefits, and near-immunity to being fired.

On the local level, cities large and small are facing huge deficits generated largely by that compensation advantage, with contracts guaranteeing lifelong pensions that are going to bankrupt more and more cities.

And heaven help the city councilman who objects. Those unions will campaign vigorously against anyone who gainsays them, manning phonebanks, walking precincts, mailing one slick attack ad after another against their foes and for city council candidates who kiss union rings.

And don't forget the Republican unions--prison guards and other law enforcement groups. They're not only gaming state governments, they've also turned prisons into warehouses with revolving doors where rehabilitation is nonexistent and America has become the world's leader in locking up the highest percentage of its citizens behind bars. Yay us.

Partisans left and right favor anything they think makes their side's megaphone bigger and clamps the other sides' megaphone shut.

Centrists like me demand fairness, transparency, and sophisticated legislation to try to curb the corrupting effect of both unions and corporations burying opposing voices.

I know I'm exactly as free to take out a Superbowl ad as Bill Gates or Jim's Tool and Die or the SEIU or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Only I can't, and Jim can't, and the others can.

If you think that's a level playing field you're nuts.

All the Constitution says is that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." It doesn't say whose speech. Suppose the government of China decided to spend $100 million to support a Senate campaign. Suppose I wanted to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater? Suppose I wanted to visit your church during services and read loudly from a pornographic novel throughout the service? Suppose I said you had embezzled from your company, or threatened to kill you?

None of those things were envisioned by the Founding Fathers as falling under the provisions of the First Amendment. Nor did they think commercial entities were people. After all, if a corporation's truck runs over someone I can't arrest every employee of that corporation for manslaughter. Nor can a corporation marry my sister. Groups of people aren't individual people--and commercial entities are most especially not people.

Now if Democrats and Republicans would agree that no organization with lots of money should have unlimited political freedom--neither unions nor corporations--that would be a start.

How about it?

Assertiveness vs. aggressiveness; melting pot vs. competing pots; Obama needs to be like Rhee

Frank Rich, one of the New York Times' more partisan Democratic columnists, wrote a piece urging President Obama to man up, so to speak, in the wake of Scott Brown gaining "Ted Kennedy's seat" in the Senate. It was more critical of the Democratic side than is Rich's wont usually. I wrote this comment, which the NYTimes' censors deleted.
Feel free to see why:

I wonder if the President hasn't conflated assertiveness with aggressiveness. That is, you don't have to be angry to be forceful. And if, after trying to reach compromise, you find the other side waging total political war against you, you have to go to Plan B.

--Particularly if the other party owns a TV network and hundreds of AM radio stations through various proxies, so that their propaganda issues from a thousand megaphones 24x7. I've watched Fox's supposedly straight news shows--as opposed to O'Reilly/Hannity/Huckabee et al--and even the "straight" news shows should be retitled "What the traitor in the White House did wrong today."

"No drama Obama" can't rise totally above this pitchforks-and-torches frenzy. It just makes him look like an out of touch academic.

And the President can fight back without doing things his daughters would be ashamed to know he did 20 years from now.

And he has to bear in mind that the people will opt for a compelling, emotionally satisfying narrative over the truth. I don't want him to lie but he has to put out his own narrative--not just complain about Republican spin. Do something they'll complain about. Put them on their back foot. That's what's needed. Study FDR and Teddy R. They knew how to do this.

The Prez needs to peel off independents from the Republican Leadership's awkward embrace. He can do this by hammering on the ways in which the Republican leadership continually betrays Republican voters (including all those self-described Independents who nonetheless mainly vote Republican).

Of course in doing so he'll make Boehner and Mitchell and Limbaugh and Hannity angry at him. But so what? They already do everything short of burning crosses on the White House lawn.

The average Republican I know--and I know a lot of them--is honest, trustworthy, loyal, and charitable. The average Republican leader is none of the above. Yet conservative Americans follow them because the GOP leaders manage to talk and look like them--at least in public--and because the average Democratic leader tends to look like he's pandering to government employee unions and socioethnic special interests at the expense of what is still, for a while, the Anglo majority.

So many Democratic initiatives aimed at improving social justice have wound up becoming little more than gravy trains for self-appointed ethnic leaders, or moves that symbolize the abandonment of the melting pot ideal of our immigrant-derived country in favor of a hundred pots, all competing for taxpayer-funded handouts.

Multilingual ballots, amnesty for illegal immigrants, affirmative action, school integration--all these came from noble motives, then devolved into something less.

An acquaintance of mine just came back from serving a mission in Mississippi, mainly among local blacks. He was dismayed by the culture of dependence he found there, where far too many girls' highest goal in life (he said) was to have exactly four children by the age of 16 (yes, 16--that's not a typo), in order to ensure maximum government benefits.

And if any whites complain about any of this they're instantly branded as racists and told they're guilty of "hate speech" which is grounds for dismissal in a fair number of colleges.

Most whites don't want special favors for whites. They’d vote against such a measure if it were to appear on a ballot. They want justice blind to accidents of birth. They want to see all Americans given the same opportunities, instead of seeing the son of a millionaire black doctor given preference at a college over the son of a white sharecropper. They profoundly resent being told they must sacrifice for someone else because their great-great-great-great grandfather exploited that someone else's equally remote ancestor.

Every attempt at reparations--by whatever name--for historical injustice creates a present injustice. The Democratic Party has not acknowledged this simple fact.

So the President needs call the GOP leadership the betrayers of their own constituents that they are, while at the same time pounding on his own party's leadership to embrace the little guy regardless of race, creed or national background. Affirmative action based on pure economic background would be embraced by many, for example.

And the Prez has to do the public employee unions exactly what Michelle Rhee is doing to the teachers’ unions in Washington DC's schools, on behalf of stude. Now there's a cheerfully ruthless leader to emulate. She never frowns—and she never backs down.

Tell your House representative to endorse the Senate bill

Paul Krugman's latest NYT op-ed piece ("Do the right thing") proves that the right wing caricatures of him are just that: stupid caricatures. Now if only the House Democrats will man up and follow his sound, pragmatic advice.

To quote the Spanish saying, "Algo es mejor que nada" -- "Something is better than nothing." Because our only alternative to the Senate version is no healthcare reform for another generation. So don't let your congressman ride the Horse of Pride right off the cliff.

Anything but the Senate bill means the healthcare denial industry wins, along with their sock puppets in Congress, otherwise known as the Republican leadership. The Republican rank and file will think they're winning but they'll actually be losing. A small consolation if it turns out that way.

If you're trying to decide what to tell your Congressman, just read the right wing diatribes that will throng Krugman's comment thread. Look at their gloating contempt for you and everything Democrats stand for (or at least should stand for). They want the House Democrats either to blink and pass nothing or stiffen up and demand changes to the Senate bill--but either alternative will produce exactly the same result.

The healthcare denial industry is spending over a million dollars a day, every day, seven days a week, to flood the airwaves with lying propaganda that is working. This propaganda is backed up by a legion of self-aggrandizing, self-styled pundits and rightwing talk show hosts, all in lockstep with the healtcare denial industry's message du jour.

That message is that Obama is a European Socialist, every Democratic congressman is a European Socialist, and the mild healthcare reform of the Senate bill is actually a Soviet-style nationalization of the healthcare industry that will institute death panels to kill Grandma. You laugh. But half the electorate--that half that doesn't live where you do--believe all of this.

If you think we have a snowball's chance in Hell of getting anything better--just because you and your educated friends in your college town want something better--you're dreaming.

I want something better. I want France's healthcare system, OK? I want single payer. I want to see the CEOs of the health insurance companies on the streetcorner, in rags, selling apples. Or pulling oars in slave galleys.

But the universe repeatedly fails to reconfigure itself according to my desires. How about you?

Call your congressman and say "Pass the Senate Bill. Now. Do the people's work."

Just in: Corporations are people! --the Supreme Court sez

Yesterday the Supreme Court reaffirmed its predecessors' late 19th century decision that corporations are people (along with trade unions and other organizations). As people, they have exactly the same right of free speech as you and I have.

So if you want to take out an ad during the next SuperBowl to tout your candidate or oppose the one the Chamber of Commerce is spending tens of millions of dollars to tout, well, you're free to do so. So to speak. That's a level playing field (as long as you're a billionaire).

Ok, fine. Corporations and unions and the Chamber of Commerce etc. are, I guess, collective people. So if a corporation is responsible for people's death, we can arrest that company's entire chain of command for manslaughter and send them to prison? A corporation can, um, marry someone? It gets one vote--instead of the votes of all its employees?

Honestly, is there any way to see this judgment as anything other than giving corporations all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities?

And the "corporatist five" who made this judgment call...they tend to call themselves originalists, don't they? How is this an originalist reading of the word "person" in the Constitution? Which Founding Father said corporations are persons?

Now we've all heard a lot of ignorant commentary on Supreme Court decisions. These people have a challenging job (if they choose to take it that way, which their lifetime tenure lets them avoid if they choose as well). They're certainly more knowledgeable about American jurisprudence and the Constitution than most of us.

But all of them have political affinities, and they show. This--along with the one in 2000 that tossed out Florida's legal system in favor of a judicial fiat--seem overtly political. And judgments like these show that George Bush II still presides over one of our country's three branches of government--and will do so for decades.

Remember that next time you're deciding whether it's worth voting.