Jared Berstein on the End-Game Created by Concentration of Wealth and Its Handmaiden, Power

Jared Bernstein argues that  we have locked ourselves into a going-nowhere end-game in Western culture, because "the concentration of wealth and its handmaiden--power" in our culture assures that no paradigm-shifting new ideas about our economic malaise can come before the body politic.  In his view, there was a window of opportunity during the last decade, when recession loomed, to open the discussion to new ideas.  But "the concentration of wealth and power blocked the new ideas from a fair hearing." 

President Obama on Human Rights: Missed Opportunities, Serious Failure of Leadership

I follow Charles Blow on Facebook because he's one of the best political commentators around, in my view.

And so I'm interested to see him today commenting at his Facebook page on the revelation that the Obama administration wants to make it easier for federal snoops to wiretap the internet.  Charles Blow's Facebook comment: 

Catholic Abuse Crisis, Argument and Counter-Argument: Weighing the Moral Norms

Since the conversation continues—and heatedly so, but with more heat than light ensuing—let’s try it from another angle.  I want to return now to an observation of Vincent Twomey’s to which I linked several days ago. 

Writing about the dynamic underlying the cover-up of clerical abuse by Catholic hierarchy, Twomey observes that the “real cause” of the cover-up—and Twomey finds this frightening—is “the lack of expected emotional response to reports about the abuse of children.”  As he notes, while Catholic officials have been quick to blame others for exposing the abuse and its cover-up, and have been quick to call for sympathy and understanding for clerics abusing children, nowhere has there been “any expression of horror or outrage by those who were told [about the abuse].”  And yet, in Twomey’s view, “Horror and outrage are the natural passions of the good person which God gave us to ensure that we get up and do something in the face of injustice done to others.”

DNC Asks Me for Money: No Human Rights Focus, No $$

 

I received my Democratic National Committee (DNC) survey yesterday—the one that has been discussed at various websites recently, including Americablog.  It informed me that I am a valued leader who has been specially selected for participation.

And then, of course, it dunned me for money.

Democratic Stronghold Goes Republican, After Huge Mandate for Change: A Personal Response

The Massachusetts special election has, as expected, given the Senate seat held for almost half a century by longtime health-care reform advocate Ted Kennedy to a Republican. In the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, which gave President Obama 62% of its vote in 2008. The special election gave this longstanding Democratic seat in a strongly Democratic state to a Republican whose primary claim to fame is that he owns a truck. And once posed for Cosmopolitan.

And I wish I could say I’m surprised. But as anyone reading this blog on a regular basis knows, from early in the new administration, I became convinced that the refusal to act decisively to fulfill its progressive promises and to adhere to the moral core of those promises was going radically to undermine the new administration. Click on the tag “Barack Obama” at the bottom of this posting, follow the thread back, and you’ll find posting after posting on this blog making those predictions.

I began predicting the turn to the right that we’re now seeing (turn to the right: Brown was endorsed by the savagely anti-gay National Organization for Marriage) from early in the new administration when I saw its cynical, calculating willingness to play games with the hopes and lives of gay citizens who had worked hard to elect the new president believing that he was sincere when he told us he would end DADT and work to abolish DOMA. When I saw the willingness of the new administration to waffle immediately on its moral commitment in that area, I saw the handwriting on the wall.

And I wrote on this blog that, though I had strongly supported Mr. Obama and had written over and over to praise him during the election, my energy in support of the new administration was rapidly vanishing. As I’ve stated here, I have never been so disappointed about any vote I’ve cast in any federal election during my adult life.

The pundits will pick through these election results now, and parse them every way possible. Already, centrist commentators are encouraging Mr. Obama to take the same lesson Mr. Clinton is said to have taken from the turn to the right that followed his initial period in office, and to become even more bipartisan and even more centrist than he’s already been. As if that’s even possible . . . .

There will be—there already are—claims that the progressive wing of the Democratic party in Massachusetts voted heavily for Ms. Coakley, while blue-collar Democrats turned against the new administration, due to its movement away from the center.

And these are, of course, precisely the wrong lessons to take from what has just happened in Massachusetts. As Peter Daou notes today in a HuffPo article entitled “Liberal Bloggers to Obama and Dems: We Told You So,”

I've written a number of posts arguing that it's all a matter of values and ethics. In essence: when you fail to govern based on a morally sound, well-articulated, solidly-grounded set of ideals, you look weak. All the legislative wins in the world won't change that. People gravitate to people who exude moral authority. The vast majority of voters lack the detailed policy knowledge that would enable them to make an accurate assessment of policy differences, but they do have a visceral sense of when a candidate or an elected official believes in something and fights for it. It's why campaigns are laden with moral arguments; politicians ask to be elected because they'll "do the right thing."

“Morally sound, well-articulated, solidly-grounded set of ideals”; “moral authority” as the foundation of compelling leadership: as Daou also suggests, when, on the inauguration day itself, this administration invited Rev. Rick Warren to take center stage and give the inaugural invocation while Bishop Gene Robinson’s prayer off in the wings of the stage was not even broadcast to the public, anyone watching for the moral foundations of the new administration had a strong clue as to what was about to happen to every aspect of the progressive agenda of the new administration. To every aspect demanding moral fortitude . . . .

In one year’s time, we have seen the new administration—and a Democratic-controlled Senate and House—squander the mandate provided to it by a strong majority of the American public in the last election, as the right-wing noise machine has been given every opportunity possible to crank itself up again while Democrats waste valuable time and energy catering to banks, Wall Street, and the health and pharmaceutical industries.

While Democrats diddle, the right-wing noise machine has free rein to re-animate deep racial bias, fears of necessary progressive change, sound and fury about nothing. And now we see a man with a truck and a Cosmopolitan past walking into the highest legislative body in the land as a result of the new administration’s refusal to put core values front and center as it governs.

Daou’s conclusion:

Progressive bloggers have been jumping up and down, yelling at their Democratic leaders that the path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values.

Will the new administration hear that lesson now? I very much doubt it. In my view—and I’ve stated this here repeatedly as the morally vacuous course the new administration intended to take became glaringly apparent—we are now in for a period of right-wing dominance in American politics the likes of which we haven’t seen since the McCarthy period. Nasty, gay-bashing, free-wheeling free-market dominance that will make what took place in the Bush era look like a church picnic by contrast.

Meanwhile, we who continue living in this nation have to find some way to make do—I have to find some way to make do, as one of millions of Americans without a job, with no health insurance, with monthly mortgage payments I cannot meet without dipping into my rapidly vanishing savings. As I enter my 60th year.

As I’ve shared on this blog (and I bring this up for two reasons: it’s politically pertinent, and it illustrates some of the serious day-to-day struggles that lack of equality continues to create for gay citizens of this nation), I find myself the owner of a second house in Florida that I can’t sell, and which I bought on the basis of promises made to me by a former employer who has created tremendous hardship for my partner Steve and me by breaking those promises. I’ve noted our inability to refinance the loan for this house, even after banks were given funds by the new administration precisely to enable citizens in financial distress with mortgage payments to do just that.

Recently, we’ve gone through yet another round of negotiations with our bank, Bank of America, which is the lender for this mortgage, in the hope that some way could be found to refinance the loan and reduce our prohibitive monthly payment on the note. Once again, we’ve been told at the end of that time-consuming process that the house’s precipitous drop in value from our purchase date in March 2006—it is now appraised at some $88,000 less than the purchase price—prevents the bank from assisting us.

We’ve gone through tortured negotiations with the bank that revolve around the fact that, though we’re a couple who have lived together and pooled our resources for nearly 40 years now, we’re not a legally recognized couple. We have no legal existence at all under the law of our state, or under federal law, for that matter.

This lack of any legal recognition of our shared life and shared resources results in ludicrous problems such as the following: because I have no full-time employment, and because my income in the past year has been minuscule, I automatically don’t qualify, on the face of it, for a renegotiated loan. Steve, on the other hand, has a full-time job and a decent salary.

But the house is in my name. In Florida. In a state that, like our home state, has no laws at all recognizing our existence as a couple. And so, when we bought the house, we put the house in my name, rather than attempting to deal with the legal nightmare of trying to negotiate a loan as a non-existent couple—as a couple that doesn’t exist in the state of Florida, in the eyes of the law. We put the house in my name, as well, to protect Steve’s assets in our house in Arkansas, which is in his name—for precisely the same reason: we are not legally recognized as a couple in Arkansas.

And so, the upshot is, I can't claim Steve’s salary and income as my income when I apply for a new loan. Because I have no legal connection to Steve, in the eyes of the bank. Though I live, largely, from his income. Because we are a couple.

This situation—the situation of existing in fact as a married couple, but not being legally recognized as such—does work to our advantage now, ironically. It does so in this respect: if I walk away from the mortgage in Florida, as we have told the bank we may well decide to do now that it has once again refused to renegotiate the mortgage loan, only my credit is affected.

As I stated here when I wrote about our mortgage nightmare back in December, everything in me revolts against the thought of walking away from a financial commitment. I was raised to pay my debts—all my debts. Because I have consistently done so throughout my life, I have a stellar credit rating. It galls me deeply to have been placed in this situation of unemployment and financial helplessness by the president of a United Methodist university who claims to support the rights of gay citizens, but who, after inducing Steve and me to take jobs at the institution she leads, revoked her promises to us because of her homophobia, when the United Methodist bishop who sits on her university’s governing board told us we ought not to have been hired, as a gay couple.

But we’re very seriously considering walking now. As we’ve come to see it, the banks were given money to assist people in our circumstances, and they’ve refused to do so. They’ve benefited themselves—largely so—from the government’s beneficence while refusing to do with the money they’ve received what the government instructed them to do.

And since the government’s not holding the banks’ feet to the fire, many of us caught in impossible mortgage situations with upside-down mortgages are walking. And more of us are going to walk.

And to pull our money out of the huge banks that have treated us like non-persons when we approached them to do what the government told them to do.

And to withdraw our energies from a “progressive” administration that has done nothing at all to assist us in this crisis, except to throw money at the banks who have created and are benefiting from the crisis.

Are people angry that the new administration has done virtually nothing to create new jobs, to help Americans in financial crisis, to hold Wall Street and the banks accountable for their role in creating this crisis? I think so. And a lot of that anger is coming from those who, during the campaign, were the new president’s strongest supporters.

More as this saga unfolds . . . .

A Reader Writes: You Call That a Christian Response to Health Care?

A good reader of this blog recommends to me today an op-ed statement in the Charlotte Observer, asking where Christians are as health care reform is debated.

Walker Lundy argues that, though three out of four Americans claim to be Christians, you'd never know it by listening to what folks are saying as health care is debated.

In Lundy's view,

Health care is, of course, a political issue. But when 18,000 Americans will die this year from lack of health care, when health care is the major reason for personal bankruptcies, when tens of thousands of people can't afford health insurance and when even laid-off Americans can lose affordable health care, then it is also a moral issue.

Christians of every political stripe should be asking themselves that age-old most difficult question: “What would Jesus do?”

The silence of many Christians as health care reform is relentlessly attacked is a testament to where we've ended up after several decades of adroit media manipulation of our minds by the right-wing noise machine serving the interests of rapacious economic elites. Those elites set out some decades ago very systematically to blunt the powerful social witness of Christian churches, and they found that the best possible way to do that was to divide the churches over issues of sexuality, while shifting attention away from other compelling moral issues such as health care, war and peace, and economic justice.

Sadly, those groups have been wildly successful. The Christian voices that do now speak out in the health care debate are frequently arguing against the core moral imperative of universal coverage for all citizens, and seeking to silence the voices of their own brothers and sisters who point out that access to health care for all is a moral imperative for those of us who live by the gospels.

We've let the noise machine, with the interest groups who constructed that machine to serve their economic interests, set the terms of the debate. And they've done so with amazing ease, while our moral discourse within the faith communities grows ever narrower and ever less pertinent to the really crucial moral issues of the day.

Crashing Empires and Missed Moral Opportunities: The Health Care Debacle Again

George Lakoff on where the Obama administration went wrong in presenting the case for health-care reform:

[I]t was a mistake to put cost ahead of morality. Health care is a moral issue, and the right-wing understands that and is using it. That's why the "death panels" and "government takeover" language resonates with those who have a conservative moral perspective and have effectively used terms like "pro-life." Health care is a life and death issue, which is as moral as anything could be. The insurance companies have been on the side of death, and that needs to be said overtly.

And:

• The basic values are empathy (we care about people), responsibility for ourselves and others, and the ethic of excellence (making ourselves better and the world better).

• These values form the basis of democracy: It's because we care about our fellow citizens that we have values like freedom and fairness, for everyone, not just the powerful.

• From that, it follows that government has two moral missions: protection (of consumers, workers, the environment, the old, the sick, the powerless; and empowerment through public works; communication, energy, and water systems; education; banks that work; a court system: and so on. Without them, no one makes it in America. Taxes are what you pay for protection and empowerment by the government, and the more you make the greater your responsibility to maintain the system.

Appropriate language can be found to express these values. They lie at the heart of all progressive policies. If they are out there every day, it becomes easier to discuss any issue. This is what it means to prepare the ground for specific framings.

And Frances Kissling on the lamentable sin of omission of the American Catholic bishops, who have chosen to play partisan politics in this kairotic moment of opportunity to assure access to health care for all citizens, rather than assist the new administration:

For decades the bishops have advocated for universal healthcare -- in fact, for a single-payer system with a strong emphasis on covering the uninsured, the poor and immigrants. The best shot at reform is now. But the bishops are squandering every ounce of moral capital they have, not on the public option, but on ensuring that in any reform bill not one penny of federal funds is used for abortion.

This strategy has put them in the extremist camp among those opposed to abortion. Moderate evangelicals and antiabortion Catholics bit the bullet on abortion four years ago and decided that other issues like ending wars, reducing global warming, and fighting poverty meant it was time to move on from attempting to outlaw abortion. While one can quibble with their strategy, working to prevent the need for abortion was a step forward from working to make it illegal.

Conservatives love to play games with narratives about declining empires. For generations, right-wing movements have sought to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to increasing tolerance of homosexuality.

But as the prophets of the Jewish scriptures note, the corruption that destroys one proud civilization after another has nothing at all to do with increasing tolerance of sexual minorities. Instead, empires decay when the gap between rich and poor in a society grows intolerably wide, and when the rich are allowed to continue oppressing the poor with impunity.

As the prophets note, when people of faith not only stand by in silence as such oppression weaves itself into every facet of life, but collude in the oppression, everything comes tumbling down. And when that happens, as the crash of collapsing structures of civil life becomes the only sound anyone is capable of hearing, who will listen any longer to the fine words of religious leaders who talk about economic justice for all and God’s preferential love for the poor, but who do nothing to enact their fine rhetoric in times when their voices might have counted?

Putting the Genie Back Into the Bottle: Mr. Obama Speaks of Health Care as Moral Imperative

And speaking of the health care situation, I highly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s incisive analysis at Salon earlier this week. It’s the best comprehensive overview I’ve yet seen, exposing precisely how powerful economic interest groups that have gained considerable control of the American political process in several decades of neoconservative dominance will not relinquish that control. And how and why the Democratic party continues to cave in to those groups.

Greenwald notes that the Democratic party’s excuses for its collective failures continue unabated. Now that the Democrats have the White House, a filibuster-proof majority, a huge margin in the House, and a broad popular voters’ mandate for progressive reform, we’re being told that the president is at the mercy of forces he can’t control even in his own party, when it comes to progressive reform. Greenwald’s respose:

I'm really surprised that there's anyone, especially Matt [Yglesias at Think Progress], who actually believes this -- that the Obama White House is merely an impotent, passive observer of what the Democrats in Congress do and can't be expected to do anything to secure votes for approval of the health care bill it favors. As the leader of his party, the President commands a vast infrastructure on which incumbent members of Congress rely for re-election. His popularity among Democrats vests him numerous options to punish non-compliant Democrats. And Rahm Emanuel built his career on controlling the machinations within Congress. The very idea that Obama, Emanuel and company are just sitting back, helplessly watching as Max Baucus, Kent Conrad and the Blue Dogs (Rahm's creation) destroy their health care legislation, is absurd on its face.

Greenwald notes that the White House’s ability to control is very much in evidence in its response to the progressive wing of the Democratic party. If progressives buck the party line dictated by the White House, they are quickly threatened. But blue dog Democrats and “centrists” who refuse to adhere to mandates from party leaders are protected.

In Greenwald’s view, in the back-and-forth of “bipartisan” deliberation over health care reform—deliberation engineered in many ways by Democratic party strategists, right from the top—we see a cynical game being played out. We’re led to think that the Democrats are forced to compromise because the Republicans just won’t come on board to support health care reform.

This is a pretext for watering the final bill down. And it has been the game plan of party strategists all along. Greenwald’s conclusion:

This is how things always work. The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way. When is the last time they didn't? The "public option" was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives (who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach) -- and the vast, vast majority of progressives (all but the most loyal Obama supporters) who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform. But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support. Isn't that how it always works in Washington? No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes, even if it means running roughshod over the interests of ordinary citizens (securing lower costs and expanding coverage) and/or what large majorities want.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama has finally been willing to talk—faintly and unconvincingly, particularly after the secret deal the White House has cut with the pharmaceutical industries—about health care as a “moral obligation” .*

And this necessary turn—a turn that has been necessary for the administration’s success from the outset—may well be too late. As Paul Krugman notes in today’s New York Times, Mr. Obama has now created a very serious trust problem for himself as a leader, and his progressive base is in strong reaction to his failure of leadership:

On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.

And I’m not sure that trust can be rebuilt, frankly. There has been an awful lot of water under the bridge, with the reneging on the promise to end DADT, the atrocious DOMA brief (though I applaud the recent clearer statements that the White House regards the Defense of Marriage Act as discriminatory), the back-stepping on truth commissions to deal with our legacy of torture in the last administration, the movement away from transparency in this administration, and, last but not least, the health care debacle.

This administration is not what many of us voted for. It is, above all, not what we hoped desperately to see, after the Bush administration. How do you re-enchant folks who are thoroughly disenchanted, I wonder, now that the scales have fallen from our eyes?

* For more on health care for all as a moral imperative, and on the failure of this administration to build its platform for change on such moral imperatives, click the label “moral imperative” at the link to which I have just pointed.

Moral Imperatives, Centrists, and Nuns: Continuation of Earlier Stories

And now a few more tidbits to update stories I’ve discussed in the past on this blog.

I wrote yesterday,

I continue to agree with thinkers including Paul Krugman who argue that the president’s lack of leadership is a serious obstacle to progressive change at this troubled point in our nation’s history. Krugman continues to lament Mr. Obama’s lack of passion for the moral imperatives he articulated so courageously and clearly during his campaign. And I share the lament.

If you click on the label “moral imperative” at the end of that posting, you’ll see this is a theme I have been following since the beginning of this presidency—with constant concern.

And so I’m interested to read Jonathan Weisman saying at Wall Street Journal today,

President Barack Obama, trying to regain control of the health-care debate, will likely shift his pitch in September, White House and Democratic officials said, as he faces pressure from supporters to talk more about the moral imperative to provide health insurance to all Americans.

And I completely agree with Robert L. Borosage at Huffington Post, when he says,

There are a lot of talking heads out arguing that the "left" shouldn't be so extreme as to risk health care reform by insisting on the public option or the lifting of the absurd ban on negotiating lower drug prices. The reality is exactly the reverse. It is the handful of Blue Dogs and conservative Democrats in the House and Senate that are standing in the way of the majority in favor of a comprehensive plan. The question isn't whether the progressive majority is unreasonably resisting reform to save the public option. The question is whether a small minority of conservative Democrats will sabotage reform simply to stop the public option.

72% of Americans want a public option. It’s high time that “centrists” get with the program and recognize that the center has shifted, and that many of us are growing exceptionally weary of their politics of obstruction and of the way in which they do the right’s dirty work while pretending to be in the center.

And I also blogged yesterday about the request of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that the Vatican disclose who is funding its probe of American nuns.

Since I wrote that posting, the National Catholic Reporter website has put up an excellent summary of this story by Daniel Burke, which I’d now like to recommend.

The Health Care Debacle and The Possibility of Hope: Fragments from One Spiritual Diary

Yesterday was a remarkable day. Quietly remarkable, in a way that wouldn’t be noticeable to anyone living outside my circle of experience.

I’ve felt lately the pull of a spiritual tide that I can’t quite identify. It’s an impulse—a leading might be a more accurate and traditional description—to create some space for what’s really important to come inside and live there. I have a strong tendency to fill every minute with busywork, a workaholic tendency that militates against the spiritual life.

Which requires a certain amount of emptiness. Because we can’t be filled with spirit unless we have some empty space inside for spirit to fill.

So, without being very intentional about it, I find myself slowing down lately, leaving some empty spaces in the day, letting mind and heart rest a bit. That’s not easy for me to do, because my mind whirs along all the time, jotting notes of articles to read or write, reminding me of birthday cards to send, the mint bed to check in these days of hot weather with no rain, household chores unfinished and supper menus to plan.

One reason, I feel sure, that this tide is running through my soul these days is that, due to the kindness of a number of friends, I have recently had, for the first time in several years, a number of nibbles for at least part-time work to carry us through a time of straitened circumstances to which I've alluded on this blog before. But the very opening to new possibilities provokes in me a need to listen more deeply—in part, because I'm intently aware that in places like Arkansas, which is one large overgrown neighborhood, those who wish to torpedo hopeful new possibilities for someone they regard as beyond the pale can do so very easily, with a phone call here and an insinuation there. And we who are openly and unapologetically gay do continue to be beyond the pale in places like Arkansas, as much in self-professed liberal circles as in reactionary ones.

Yesterday, I woke thinking that I’d simply use the day as a rare retreat day—listening, reading, waiting. And I did that, much of the day, without much systematic attention to doing “spiritual” things, all the while “hearing” a kind of refrain inside: Throw out what’s weighing you down; open space for the unpredictable new.

Nothing much happened as I listened to that refrain. And yet, as the day ended, I realized that something of importance had happened. And that it constituted a quiet lesson to me about the rhythm of emptying-receiving, of giving and being given to, that is at the heart of spiritual life.

First the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and a neighbor from across the street was standing there, holding in her hands a basket of vegetables. She had been to the farmers’ market on the weekend and wanted to share her finds with me—summer squash, cucumbers, new potatoes, and tomatoes.

I had cooked all the potatoes in the house on the weekend, and needed the new potatoes for a dish of goulash I had made for our friend Mary on Sunday as part of my ongoing soup-of-the-week birthday gift to her this year. And I enjoyed the opportunity to visit with a neighbor whom I ought to think about more often, since she has suffered a number of major losses in her family in the past several years.

As I washed the vegetables and put them away, cubing the potatoes for my goulash, the phone rang. It was my aunt, calling to tell me she had baked cranberry-nut bread on the weekend and wanted to bring Steve and me some of it. She takes the daily paper and we don’t, and I had intended to call and ask her for Sunday’s paper, since there was an article I needed to read in it. So her visit brought two gifts at once—the nut bread and the paper I needed to read.

A second surprise gift and a second surprise visit with someone whom Steve and I constantly challenge ourselves to keep in mind and heart, my feisty, independent aunt, who resists depending on anyone but who, like all of us, increasingly needs small favors and assistance as she ages.

Then the mail arrived, and in it was a letter from a friend. With a check in an astonishing amount made out to me. The letter tells me my blogging makes a difference. I suppose the check is a statement of support for the blog.

There’s not a chance I would accept this gift, though I am deeply touched by it—and that’s an even better gift than the check itself. This is a friend who has been kind beyond all measure to Steve and me in the past. When we were forced to leave North Carolina after losing our jobs at the wretched right-wing Catholic school there that effectively ended our careers as theologians, he showed up on our doorstep the night before we moved, a check in hand—in the same amount that he sent yesterday.

On that occasion, we accepted the gift, since moving was stretching us beyond the limit, and those were the years when we had the added responsibility of taking care of my mother, with additional expenses I didn’t track in our budget, because who tracks the flow of money to and from family members at times in which caregiving is taking place?

We took the money on that occasion, that is, with the understanding that when we were able, we’d repay the gift in some way. And we were very happy a few years ago when, after our lives were turned upside down yet again by another faith-based university that also regards gay people as subhuman, we could bring our friend the furniture we’d bought to furnish a new house when we accepted an invitation to come to that Methodist institution, only to have the promises our friend made to lure us there broken within a year.

He had just moved into a new townhouse and had little furniture to fill the rooms. He gives. Constantly. He is a former Methodist who takes seriously John Wesley’s injunction to do all the good we can in all the ways and places we can for as long as we can, though he’d never dream of setting foot inside a Methodist church today, given what his childhood church is doing to gay people while claiming to follow Wesley’s example.

Because he gives without counting the cost, our friend has not set aside many things for himself. It did our hearts good—tremendous good—to be able to bring a truckload of new furniture, dishes, pots and pans, garden things, to him, to help him clean and set up the new place.

And now he is trying to give again, far more lavishly than he should be giving, and I can’t accept such a lavish gift, knowing his situation. But I am moved powerfully by this kindness, and by the vote of confidence in my blog.

And by that third confirmation, in a day of gifts, that life is, as I seem to be intuiting lately, all about giving and receiving, opening spaces inside us for spiritual energy—for love—to fill. This is a message I need to hear in these dark days in which people openly carry assault weapons to political rallies at which the president is appearing. We are in a bad place, as a nation. And things are going to get worse. I feel it in my bones.

When Bob Herbert notes the intent anxiety the health care debacle is causing American citizens, I know he’s right. Because I feel that anxiety in my own body and soul. It weighs me down these days, like some heavy stone appended to my heart.

I can’t think of a time in the recent past when I have felt less hopeful about the future of my country than I do now. When Mr. Obama was elected, an Irish friend of mine who is exceptionally wise—he has more than 90 years of living, studying, teaching, and gardening behind him to fund his wisdom—wrote to say that he and many other Irish people were delighted at what the new president symbolized. To my friend, Obama stands for the hope that the United States will one day awaken from the foolish adolescent dreams that sustained the Reagan and Bush presidencies, and damaged the whole world while Mr. Bush was in power.

But my friend cautioned me: don’t hope for too much. What Mr. Obama can change will be only what the real rulers of the U.S. (and of the world) permit him to change. What he can change will be only what the Wall Street executives, the bankers, the heads of major corporations, the insurance executives allow him to change. Nothing more.

I think about that letter a lot these days. Because it turns out that my Irish friend was right. And, as a result, I feel rather hopeless about the possibility of substantive, meaningful change in the U.S. The reins of power are not in the hands of the people who elected Mr. Obama and gave a Democratic majority to Congress. They are not in the hands of the 72% of Americans who want a public option in health care. They are in the hands of the men my Irish friend’s letter names as our real rulers. Firmly in those hands.

I continue to agree with thinkers including Paul Krugman who argue that the president’s lack of leadership is a serious obstacle to progressive change at this troubled point in our nation’s history. Krugman continues to lament Mr. Obama’s lack of passion for the moral imperatives he articulated so courageously and clearly during his campaign. And I share the lament.

But I’m also aware that the president is up against some serious obstacles (though his temerity about leading makes those obstacles more serious): he’s up against the treachery of members of his own party who belong lock, stock, and barrel to big business and the religious right; he has to face racism so endemic and toxic in this nation that we the people willingly permit gun-toting hooligans to dog his steps, when even a peep of protest at gatherings held by Mr. Bush was immediately and ruthlessly suppressed. He has also surrounded himself with soulless pragmatists who care more about playing cynical beltway political games that are all about winning, than they care about the mandate for progressive change this president (and Congress) was given in the last election.

And he’s up against Republicans that mumble about morality and scream about religion while belying everything the major religions stand for at their core, in their most cherished convictions. Above all, he’s up against powerful economic interests that simply will not relent, will not relinquish the control they have gained in several decades of neoconservative dominance that were, in the final analysis, all about consolidating that control.

And it may simply be too late to change things, when the mechanisms of that control are now so firmly in place and so omnipresent, especially in the mainstream media. And not just in the United States, but around the globe.

News of the Week: Health Care Reform and Democratic Failure

Tidbits from articles that have caught my eye this week, re: the health care debacle. If the selections below share a common theme beyond commenting on the health care issue, it’s, in my view, the colossal mistake the current administration made when it decided to continue with the cynical, morally vacuous, politically suicidal 1990s-style Clintonian appeasement of the right and slapping down of progressives.

Those of us following the administration’s track record on gay issues saw this happening from the outset. What has happened to the health care debate has not taken us by surprise. When the president refused to lead, to stand unambiguously by the progressive promises he made during his campaign (and the moral imperatives on which those promises were made), we knew trouble was coming.

You don’t appease ravenous mobs howling for blood, who will never be satisfied, even as you cut one sweet deal after another for those pulling the strings of such mobs. And you don’t win the battle with these powerfully connected and highly funded groups by turning your back on your most ardent supporters, those who caught the passion of the message about progressive change and were foolish enough to believe it.

And so to the week’s commentary: here’s Paul Krugman commenting today on Mr. Obama’s inability to continue engaging the passions and energies of those who elected him with high hopes, and his consequent failure in the area of health care reform:

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

And Peter Daou writing several days ago at Huffington Post about the failure of the administration to enter health care reform with a clear, unambiguous progressive message, and how that failure has allowed the fringe right once again to frame the discussion:

…[T]he debate over health reform is playing out on the right's terms. The national discourse (if you can call it that) could very well have been about the benefits of a single-payer system, but aside from a sham vote to appease progressives, single-payer is considered anathema in the media and political establishment and instead Democrats are scrambling to respond to a barrage of rightwing talking points.

How to deal with the problem? On health care, the countervailing approach would have been to start from a solid progressive position and negotiate from there. It's still likely that the White House will manage to push through a health care bill - and the media will cheer it as a victory. But because the terms of the debate were ceded early on by Democrats, we will end up with something far weaker than we could and should have.

And Drew Westen at Huffington Post, writing about the waning hopes of Mr. Obama’s supporters in the middle of the Democratic party, who joined progressives in the last election in giving the administration a mandate for change we could believe in:

The American people did not vote for "bipartisan" solutions that split the difference between the failed ideology of the last eight years, which continues to cost thousands of people their jobs and homes every day, and the change the President and the super-majorities they elected in both houses of Congress promised.

And Michael Brenner at Huffington Post, putting the blame for the failure of the administration to push health care reform through squarely on Mr. Obama’s shoulders, because he has ignored the popular mandate for progressive change given to him, while he kowtows to the high and mighty:

It is Barack Obama who is to blame for this. For months, he stayed aloof from the out-of-control Congressional maneuvering based on a strange belief in some kind of bipartisan collective will emerging by osmosis. He never leaned the weight of his person and his office to elements of reform that has been touting as candidate and then President. He deceived the country by pursuing secret talks with the very lobbies who are the heart of disgraceful national health care situation. He entered into deals that were weighted heavily in their selfish interest rather than the national interest. In short, we have gotten from him the antithesis of what we were promised and expected -- in the substance and process of policy both. We have instead a conventionally minded politician overly respectful of the status quo and deferential to those who control and profit from it, A man with no apparent fixed convictions.

Serious health care reform is gone with the wind. It cannot be retrieved. All other domestic issues pale in importance by comparison -- except for the financial crisis. On that front, Obama has behaved exactly as he now has done on the health care front. That is to say, viewing the world from the prejudicial perspective of the high and mighty while neglecting his duty to the citizenry and those who put their trust in him. The question: 'who really is Barack Obama?' is more compelling than ever. The answer looks to be more and more disheartening.

I am appalled, by the way, at the statements of former President Clinton last night that his DADT and DOMA policies are due to the failure of the progressive wing of the Democratic party to support him. This is not how I remember the Clinton administration and the implementation of those policies.

What I remember clearly is a centrist Democrat who played a decisive role in moving the Democratic party to the right when he was president, as he cut one deal after another with corporate interest groups. I remember a man who talked about family values when his own house was not in order in that respect, and who willingly threw gay and lesbian supporters under the bus from the outset of his administration while he spouted rhetoric about family values. I remember his using us as pawns in cynical games designed to appease his Republican detractors and the fringe right.

Mr. Clinton is re-writing history. The problem is not and never has been the unwillingness of progressives to fight for the policies Democratic administrations seek to implement. The problem has been the unwillingness of Democratic leaders, once they are in power, to carry through on their promises to the majority of Americans who lean to the left of what is now the center on one issue after another. The problem is that the Democratic party only woos us when it has made such a mess of things, by its spineless appeasement of the far right, that it wants us to try to clean up its mess.

Which is essentially what President Clinton was asking progressives to do when he addressed the Netroots conference last night, while wagging his finger at the very people he wanted to enlist in the health care reform battle, when he was asked why his administration enacted both DADT and DOMA. To the extent that the Obama administration has adopted the 1990s Clintonian playbook--and it has done so to a woeful extent, in my view--it has undermined its effectiveness by undercutting the moral imperatives it articulated clearly when it campaigned, but on which it now refuses to act.

The Struggle for Health Care in the U.S. Today: A Personal Statement

It occurs to me to accompany the postings I’ve been making about the health care debacle and town hall meetings with some first-hand testimony about my own struggle with the American system of health-care provision. For readers who have followed this blog for some time now, these stories won’t be new. But for those who log in only occasionally or may be new readers, the personal angle I bring to my analysis of the health care debates may not be apparent.

Warning: personal testimony to follow. For readers who do not welcome such personally revelatory statements, please be forewarned that what follows is written from personal experience and from the heart, without a great deal of intellectual baggage to cover over the emotional depths the narrative discloses.

I write about these issues—and it’s important to acknowledge this—as one of millions of Americans who have no health insurance, and who, as a consequence, live in constant anxiety about what might happen if we need medical treatment. As those living in the U.S. know, having health insurance depends absolutely on having a job.

I don’t have a job—not a full-time paying job, that is. I have been out of work since the summer of 2007, when my job as the academic vice-president of a United Methodist university in Florida ended precipitously and unhappily, through no fault of my own.

Through no fault of my own: that’s an important qualifier to make here, one that applies to me as well as to millions of others who are out of work. There is a tendency among those who have secure jobs—a tendency rooted in the Puritan theological substratum that so powerfully informs the American imagination—to presuppose that those without jobs and health coverage deserve to be where we are. We haven’t worked hard enough. We haven’t tried. We can’t keep a job due to our lack of a strong work ethic and lack of righteousness. (We're black, we're lazy, we're immoral, we want to sponge off other hard-working Americans.)

I resist those judgments, though the leader of the United Methodist university that has put me in my current situation has sought to make several of them (e.g., the charge that I did not work hard and am incompetent) stick in my case. I resist them because they are untrue and I know they are untrue. People sometimes lose their jobs through no fault of their own, because of gross injustice, because of the malfeasance and lack of integrity of their supervisors. Or because of prejudice, simply because of who they happen to be. Not because they have failed to work hard and have not excelled at their work.

And when they lose their jobs, they lose health coverage—effectively speaking, in almost all cases—in the United States. It is hard for my European and Canadian friends even to imagine what happens to someone in the U.S. who is without a full-time job. The systems of almost every other developed nation in the world assure that for someone without work, the added anxiety and burden of not being able to seek medical treatment will, at least, be lifted from one’s shoulders as one copes with the indignity and pain of unemployment.

I happen to know the Canadian system, since I lived in Canada for six years as a graduate student and qualified—solely because I was a human being and happened to be living in that country on a student visa—for national medical coverage during my years as a graduate student in Canada. I did not pay a penny for this coverage. I could ill afford to pay for any medical treatment I received in Canada, in any case, because, like many other graduate students, I lived on a shoestring budget during my years of study.

I can say from first-hand knowledge what a relief it was during my years of study in Canada to be able to go to a doctor, knowing I would be seen and treated when I needed medical help, without anxiety about how I would pay. I never paid a single doctor’s bill in my years in Canada, though I had good, ongoing care all the years I was there. I did not pay for any medicine I took in those years.

That system spared me, as it spares millions of people in other developed nations, the kind of anxiety I now face on a daily basis while I am unemployed. Because Steve and I simply cannot afford for me to buy any health insurance on his salary—because, as I have noted previously, we are now saddled with mortgage payments for a house we bought in Florida solely because the “friend” who ended our jobs there in 2007 with specious and unjust reasons for her actions had promised us jobs up to our retirement—I live without health insurance.

Like many gay couples around the country, we live in an area in which few employers provide partner benefits. So I am unable to qualify for health insurance under the plan that covers Steve as a full-time employee.

The upshot is that I do anything possible to avoid seeing a doctor. In the two years I have been without health insurance, I have been to see a doctor twice, to the best of my recollection. Those were occasions on which I simply could not defer seeking medical treatment. I paid out of pocket on both occasions, and when one of those visits required me to fill a prescription for an antibiotic, I found that the pills were astronomically, prohibitively expensive. But I had no choice except to pay for them, out of my pocket.

I have been to the dentist twice in the same period, again, because I simply could not avoid going. I put off regular dental check-ups, and I have ignored calls reminding me of my need for a colonoscopy, as part of the ongoing care my previous doctor recommended for me as a man nearing 60, who suffers from mild high blood pressure and is at the borderline of diabetes. I cannot begin to think of paying for the kind of routine, ongoing exams men of my age need. I just don’t have them done. I pray a lot.

I’m told that, if some emergency did come up, I could surely obtain treatment at an emergency room. I like to think that’s probable. I’m also aware that anyone going to the emergency room at many American hospitals is likely to encounter all sorts of obstacles, and can also sometimes receive less than optimal treatment from the over-worked ER staff who do not know those they’re treating, and who haven’t followed the particular needs of these particular patients.

I’m also aware—and I live in great fear of this—that ongoing medical treatment, if I’m in a situation of calamity, could simply wipe out all of my savings, take my house, and destroy me financially. Again, my Canadian and European friends are baffled when I tell them this is possible. They cannot imagine sane, healthy societies in which such possibilities, such dire no-win options, can confront human beings.

I am not complaining. I am explaining, or trying to do so. I have, in some respects, a richer life than do many of the millions without health insurance. I at least have a house in which to live, though it's not yet paid for. I occasionally travel, when I can use my frequent-flyer miles and have invitations to stay with hosts who kindly offer me hospitality.

I am privileged, in that I am white and male. I do not share in all the privilege many white men take for granted, because I also happen to be gay. But I am aware that my pigmentation and my gender do play a role in my privilege, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that society accords unwarranted power and privilege to people on the basis of skin color and gender—and so many of the millions of Americans without health coverage struggle with even more difficult burdens than those confronting me, simply because of their race and/or gender.

I am also aware that my education places me in a separate category from many of those who have no health coverage. Many of those without health insurance do not have the benefit of tools available to me simply because I have an education, or the status accorded to me in some circles because I have an education.

Even so, in the final analysis, I hope my story will also convince some readers that just about anything is possible, when it comes to finding and keeping a job and having access to medical treatment in the U.S. I’m a Ph.D. nearing 60 who has simply been unable to find full-time work that in any way fits my credentials and background, for two years now.

And I’ve tried hard. I’ve networked. I’ve sent out countless letters of inquiry. Admittedly, my own background makes it difficult to find a job that fits, since my education is in the field of theology, hardly a field for which employers are breaking down the door. And jobs for people in academic administration are extremely limited in number, and even harder to find when one ends a previous job under a cloud created by an unscrupulous, but powerful, supervisor.

I have good friends assisting me, and I appreciate their assistance. I’m aware that I could perhaps take a job flipping hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant, and as some readers might point out, if I were really desperate to have health coverage, I ought to consider such an option.

I have avoided that path so far not because I feel myself superior to any kind of honest labor. A saying drilled into me by my parents as I grew up is that all labor is worthy labor, if it is honest labor. I have avoided taking that path primarily because I think my talents—what I have to offer as a human being—lie in other directions. And I would hope to find work that uses those talents and allows others to benefit from them.

So this is the story of one American who has worked very hard all his life, who happens to have earned a Ph.D. and two M.A. degrees, who has written some four or five books and countless articles, who has excelled at teaching and scholarship, who has been urged to undertake administrative work in higher education against his own instincts because he was told that he has a talent for interacting with many kinds of people and getting them to work effectively together.

And who cannot now find a job, as he nears 60. And who, as a result, is unable to afford the kind of ongoing monitoring of his health that is recommended for a man his age, or even to purchase medical treatment except in situations of imperative need.

And, of course, who does also happen to be gay—and that fact has undeniably played a very strong role in placing me in the situation in which I now find myself. Employers—faith-based employers included, and perhaps predominantly—still find it possible in many parts of the U.S. to use sexual orientation as a convenient way to dismiss good workers who have, for whatever reason, run afoul of their bosses. And they are upheld in these actions by the legal systems in much of the country, and by the churches that sponsor the institutions they run.

In the final analysis, it has not really given me much joy to read recently that both of the church-owned colleges/universities at which Steve and I have experienced gross, life-altering injustice now find themselves in hot water due to their long track records of grossly discriminatory behavior. As I have read about what is happening at both of these institutions, one in North Carolina and one in Florida, I am not really heartened. I feel no Schadenfreude.

I feel, rather, disgust that people can continue behaving so badly, and be kept in power for years as they hurt first one person after another, while church leaders look on with blind eyes. I feel great sadness that people who treat others as objects, who engage in persistently immoral, unjust, and even illegal behavior, are not only frequently maintained in their positions of power in church institutions, but that they learn nothing—absolutely nothing—over the years.

As the Catholic school in North Carolina booted me out, it began a rumor campaign to destroy my reputation by insinuating that 1) I was gay (I had not yet come out of the closet at work), and 2) I was pro-abortion. I am, of course, gay and I chose to respond to that insinuation by battering down the closet door, thereby taking a moral high road that the Catholic institution had forfeited by its lying and rumor-mongering. They did me a favor by creating the conditions in which I could finally be open and public about myself, though taking that step ended my career as a theologian working in Catholic institutions.

The rumor about my being pro-abortion was simply baffling, since I had never taught or published a single thing on that subject up to this point in my career. It was, I realized, simply how this Catholic institution liked to deal with people it chose to destroy. The worst possible charge that the old boys running that institution, other than the charge that one was gay, was that one was an abortion promoter.

So it really does not give me much satisfaction to read now, as this school is faced with public (and legal) censure for its well-entrenched patterns of discrimination, that it is using precisely those same insinuations to destroy the career of yet another faculty member, more than fifteen years after it did this to me. And, even though the school may well suffer some legal penalties for this behavior, it knows it can still get away with such behavior in the powerful, rich right-wing Catholic circles it inhabits. In fact, the school and its old boys' network count on this behavior to earn them good publicity and perks in the right-wing Catholic world. Even as I write this, the school is being lionized in the media of those circles, as a martyr for Catholic values experiencing unjust persecution for its fidelity to the magisterium.

And the other school? Same story in another church context. Same replication of utterly dysfunctional patterns by a wretchedly incompetent and morally challenged leader whose legacy has come to be consistent, every place she goes, because she is incapable of seeing those with whom she works and those who work for her as more than objects in some bizarre psychodrama going on inside her own mind. At her previous school, when she left, people rejoiced openly, and spoke of her as someone who leaves a trail of bloody bodies everywhere she walks.

The same pattern is now emerging at her next school, where she continues to be kept in power, even as things fall apart and she does precisely—almost as if she is following a script—what she did at her previous school, actions that led to her censure by an academic watchdog body and are now being discussed negatively in national scholarly publications about academic freedom.

Sad, how little we learn. Sad, how those who cannot learn and whose corruption leads them to damage others, can be kept in power even while they destroy the institutions they lead and the lives of many who work for them. Sad, how the churches in which some of these academic leaders find shelter continue to provide safe haven for them, even as they harm one person after another. Sad, that one of the constant patterns in these stories in church-related institutions is the willingness of churches to empower and give the benefit of the doubt, in particular, to known gay bashers.

And sad that for many of us who are their victims, and for many who are victims of incompetent and immoral bosses in other settings, or whose jobs have been cut for financial reasons, or who have lost employment due to a myriad of other factors beyond their control, there is the tremendous challenge of living without access to basic, ongoing health care even as we search for jobs. And sad beyond belief that many Americans are unable to see that leaving huge numbers of their fellow citizens in that boat affects all of us.

Town-Hall Mobs and the Politics of Racism: Continuing to Make the Connections

Yesterday, I noted that there is a direct line of inheritance from white mob violence during the Civil Rights movement in the South, which sought to stop integration in its tracks, to the mobs now disrupting town hall meetings occurring across the U.S. I noted that the violence of angry white mobs in places like Little Rock in 1957 was orchestrated: well-organized, well-funded right wing groups disseminated lies to inflame the fear and rage of whites who felt they were losing control as racial mores shifted. Mob behavior was the predictable result of that process.

I remember some of the inflammatory literature circulated in my own high school in south Arkansas as integration began there in the early 1960s. For years, a friend of mine held onto the pamphlets, to document what had taken place in our little town in that time frame—in our churches, families, businesses, and schools; in all the local institutions in which these flyers were disseminated. If, years down the road, we doubted what people had been capable of in our own town, we pulled out those flyers and read them again.

They were lurid. They were shameful. They were full of lies. They traded on the deep fear of Southern white men that “their” women were about to be snatched away by sexually powerful black men. They showed blond white women dancing with very black men.

The pamphlets asked if this is what we wanted—because it was what we were going to get, if we didn’t fight for our Southern way of life. This racial mixing, the loss of our daughters and sisters to black men. Venereal diseases transmitted by school toilets. The mongrelization of the race.

I stated in yesterday’s posting,

Sound familiar? For anyone who lived through this period of Southern history, it is impossible, I suspect, to look at the rage-contorted faces of the organized mobs now shouting speakers down at town hall meetings and not call to mind what went on in our part of the country in the 1950s and 1960s.

The faces are the same. The tactics are the same. The goal—dissemination of lies to fuel fear and rage leading to social regression—is the same.

And today, I’m encouraged to see that I am not the only one who is getting the direct line between those racist demonstrations of the Civil Rights period in the South and today’s mobs disrupting town hall meetings. Frank Schaeffer has published a piece at today’s Alternet site noting the same connection.

Schaeffer knows the underbelly of right-wing mob behavior intimately. As he notes, he and his father were among the leading architects of religious-right mob activity in the 1970s.

Schaeffer notes the racial hysteria that lies just beneath the surface of the mobs seeking to disrupt town-hall meetings. In his view, the mentality underlying these demonstrations is apocalyptic: the white men who have called all the shots in this country for so long cannot accept their loss of power, and violence is their reflex response—violence designed to bring everything down, if they are no longer in control:

[Dick] Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?

I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.

And so we have organized interest groups doing everything in their power to inflame the rage of those who sense that they have lost control, disseminating lies to fuel the rage, encouraging those on the rampage to tell further lies, and to engage in violence if necessary, to stop progressive change. Just as happened in the 1950s and 1960s in town after town across the American South . . . .

Paul Krugman also catches the strong racist subtext of the town-hall meetings in an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. As he notes, the mobs and their organizers are employing precisely the strategy (and exploiting precisely the subliminal fears) that Nixon’s Southern strategy used to capture the loyalty of white Southerners to the Republican party:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

He also notes that the new administration’s inability to energize its base, as the far-right fringe now comes alive with passionate intensity, may well create serious problems for the administration. If health-care reform fails because this administration has undercut the passion and conviction of its most loyal supporters through a politics of cool pragmatic calculation rather than moral conviction, we may be in for a very troubled time. And those who remember what happened in the 1950s and 1960s should know what is possible, when emboldened mobs full of passionate intensity are allowed to rampage freely while those who know better lack all conviction.

The Struggle for Black Rights and Gay Rights: Historical Parallels

I am reading these days Grif Stockley’s outstanding comprehensive history of race relations in Arkansas, Ruled by Race (Fayetteville: Univ. of AR Press, 2009). And as I do so, passage after passage tugs at me as a reminder of how far we have yet to go in many respects in our society, to realize the ideals implanted by our founders in our participatory democracy.

Stockley’s book reminds me, too, of why I frame some of the issues I think about now in terms that have become second-nature to me. I wrote yesterday, for instance,

Moral imperatives just don't come and go, as it becomes expedient to attend to them (or, more to the point, to ignore them). For many of us, they remain powerfully important even after election promises have been made and election cycles are over.

And the following passage (p. 326) in Stockley’s book reminds me of why I have no choice except to think that way, as I look at how the new administration is choosing to do business:

The death of John F. Kennedy was a grievous blow to many blacks in Arkansas. . . . And yet it was dyed-in-the-wool Southerner Lyndon Baines Johnson who used every bit of his political skill as president to pass and implement into law the hopes that blacks had for change. Time and again Johnson emphasized morality as a basis for action. It was the issue of right and wrong that, as president, Johnson hammered home. In signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, Johnson said to America,

“The reasons for racial discrimination . . . are deeply embedded in history, tradition, and the nature of man. . . . But it cannot continue. The Constitution, the principles of freedom and morality all forbid such unequal treatment.”

Where President Johnson was going as a Southerner, few, and none in politics, had gone before. Not only did Johnson characterize race as a moral issue, but he was also willing to confront the demons that all but a few white Southerners had avoided.

And of course, as I read this passage, I ask myself why a recognition so painfully achieved by some Americans in the years in which I came of age seems impossible to achieve today, when it comes to gay rights. Here is a man whose personal history was deeply imbued with prejudice, recognizing that we cannot morally and constitutionally continue upholding racial discrimination no matter how deeply encoded that discrimination is in our history, tradition, and perhaps even our nature.

Why is it so difficult for many of us today to see the parallels between the gay struggle for full personhood and that of people of color?

And seeing, to act, since, as Stockley emphasizes, what makes Johnson’s story heroic is that he chose to act, once he recognize the moral imperative for ending racial discrimination.

Call Out the Fire Brigades: The DNC, Town Hall Thugs, and Progressive Bloggers

Jeffrey Feldman has important advice for the Democratic party, vis-a-vis the health care reform process. Feldman specializes in analyzing the kind of rhetoric that moves people, in processes of political reform. His 2007 book Framing the Debate argues that, if the progressive movement wants to gain people's attention and motivate them, it needs to shift from cool, rational terminology to engaged, emotive frames for political analysis.

It needs to do, in other words, what the right has done adroitly for some time now. It needs to stop yielding terms like "moral," or "family," or "compassion" to the right, and begin claiming those terms for itself, using them to frame national discussion. As Feldman notes, in the health care debates, the Democratic National Party should be telling stories of how lack of health care coverage affects individuals and families. It should be speaking with passion, not in dispassionate statistical terms.

Feldman offers Democratic strategists a list of point-by-point suggestions about how to accomplish that broad goal. These include the following:

Fourth, Democrats need to enlist and energize the grassroots of their party. After the election, the Obama campaign left one of the greatest legacies in political history: hundreds of thousands of Americans centrally organized via the internet and willing to turn out to push for real change. These people need to be mobilized with the same passionate arguments that got them to turn out to walk door-to-door in cold weather to elect a President.

But there's the rub. I noted (here and here) back in May how the penchant of this administration for cool, calculating pragmatic deliberation and consultation, rather than engaged, morally driven action for political change, was undermining its effectiveness. I noted that the energy of many of us who had been among the new president's most passionately committed supporters was waning, as he stalled, back-stepped, and did not move forward to fulfill his campaign promises.

I have noted on this thread the persistent tendency of the Democratic party to take its progressive supporters for granted. We are welcome during election cycles. We're encouraged to speak out, to blog, to bring in the vote.

But having helped our candidate win, we're then told that we're not welcome at the table, that our expectation of substantive progressive change is naive. We're told to stop pressing for change and to keep quiet. Post-election, when our blogging centers on calling those we've elected to accountability, we're told that it has become problematic, a challenge for the administration to overcome rather than a valued ally in the movement for progressive change.

As a result, now, when our passion is needed again in the health care debate, when the administration is facing angry crowds organized by powerful, wealthy interest groups intent on blocking health care reform, when our energy could do much to move the reform process forward, many of us are simply no longer available. One can be told only so often that she or he is not wanted.

I agree with Feldman. The Democratic party would be wise to enlist and energize its grassroots, which--outside the moribund circles of power in D.C.--are generally progressive. But if it expects us to keep on speaking out, it has to find ways to assure us that our voices count, period--not just when more hands are needed to douse the fires of the right.

Moral imperatives just don't come and go, as it becomes expedient to attend to them (or, more to the point, to ignore them). For many of us, they remain powerfully important even after election promises have been made and election cycles are over.

Health Care Reform and Blue Dog Profits: A Call to Share the Wealth

And as reports circulate about the funds now pouring into the coffers of those blue dog Democrats who are working hard to subvert a plan for universal health care in the United States, it occurs to me that those of us who promote access to basic, quality health care as a human right for all ought to publicize the names and contact information of these suddenly wealthy public servants.

Since I live in Representative Mike Ross's state and since he's featured in the story to which I link above, I'll help by publicizing his contact information. He can be mailed or called at 2436 Rayburn House Office Bldg., Washington, DC 20515 (1-800-223-2220; [202] 225-1314 Fax).

Rep. Ross's helpful website has a "How May I Help You?" section. So I feel sure that he will be interested in hearing from the millions of American families that cannot afford basic, quality health care, and, in particular, from those millions of families whose children are without access to basic health care.

If you're in that boat or care about those who are in that boat, perhaps you can join me in directing those families to Rep. Ross. He has a sudden windfall to help these families in need, and he appears eager to help.

His website tells us that he and his wife and children are "active members of the First United Methodist Church in Prescott [Arkansas]." That's important to know, for those of us looking for him to help, because the Social Principles of his United Methodist Church state (paragraph 162) that "health care is a basic right." And in 2001, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church adopted a resolution calling for universal health care in the United States.

So I feel sure that we can trust Rep. Ross's promise that he wants to help. I feel certain that he is preparing to use all that money now flowing into his coffers from the health care and health insurance industry to help the millions of Americans, including many, many poor children, without access to basic, quality health care.

Please contact him. He'll want to hear from you, and he has pledged to help.

Faith Communities in Support of Health Care for All: A Catholic Perspective

The latest editorial in the national publication National Catholic Reporter calls for health care reform now, noting that the president promised this when he campaigned, and that access to health care for all citizens is a moral imperative.

For NCR, the moral imperative calls for universal access to affordable quality health care for all citizens. Anything short of that will represent a failure on the part of the administration.

And as I have repeatedly noted on this blog, such moral imperatives should be framing the administration's policy initiatives from the start of the new administration, when the window is still open for substantial reform.

Select passages:

Sixty-four years later, nearly two decades since legislators last seriously considered comprehensive health reform, it is long past time for Congress to act. President Obama ran on a platform of reforming health care. The legislative and political window will be open only briefly. The moment to act is now.

The basic principle of true health care reform is clear, as it was in Truman’s day: Any program that emerges must include universal access to affordable quality care. Bishop William Murphy, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, had it right this spring when he told the Senate Finance Committee that “the moral measure of any health care reform proposal is whether it offers affordable and accessible health care to all, beginning with those most in need.”

Anything less, given the moment, will be judged a failure.

And,

The politics of the “public option” are, to say the least, difficult. The forces arrayed against it -- largely private insurance companies -- are powerful. It remains, however, the most effective means under consideration to achieve universal affordable quality care for all Americans.

It is shameful that the wealthiest nation in the world, one that prides itself on its level of material development, is still bickering about what every other developed nation in the world has long since accomplished: making basic health care accessible to all citizens. Our inability as a nation to frame this discussion as the moral discussion it is speaks volumes about how our material development has vastly outpaced our moral development, as a people.