The Public Option Is Officially Dead, And Apparently It's Nobody's Fault

Spare me the excuses, Pelosi.

Yesterday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that there would be no public option in the health care “reform” legislation that she will send to the House floor for a vote next week.

In the words of Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey changey thing workin’ out for ya?”

Yes, it’s a sad day when the actions of the Democratic Party prompt me to quote the wordsmith of Wasilla, but this is what it’s come to in light of Pelosi declaring, “I’m quite sad that a public option isn’t in there. But it isn’t a case of it’s not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It’s not in there because they don’t have the votes to have it in there.”

Pelosi made this statement on Friday, one day after Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said if the House version included a public option, he’d whip for it. The White House meanwhile, is publicly keeping its distance from the proceedings, and clearly doesn’t mind the lack of a public option.

So this is it, huh? It seems that just about everyone in the Democratic Party is for the public option, but everyone’s against it. Pelosi is blaming the Senate. The Senate’s leadership is saying they’d try to make it happen if the House passes the public option. And Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care what passes at this point, as long as he can call it “reform.” Call me cynical, but I think this has been one big carefully orchestrated charade in which all of the major players have plausible deniability on the question of who really killed the public option.

The more I watch the Democrats exercise their majorities in Congress with Obama in the White House, the more I’m coming to believe that the Democrats are pathetic on purpose. No powerful organization is this inept and unsure of itself. It’s no secret the Democratic Party is a corporatist party, but nonetheless they are more likely than the GOP to enact laws that are beneficial to the average American. But with the GOP out of power, we can clearly see just how bought-and-paid-for the Democrats really are. A huge majority of registered Democrats want a public option, as does a majority of Americans when Independents and even Republicans are included. And yet the Democratic Party is telling me that they don’t have the votes? Why the fuck not? Especially now with things looking as if the senate is going to pass health care using reconciliation, which will require a simple 51-vote majority in the senate. That means that nine Democrats could defect and vote against the bill, and it could still pass, with Vice President Joe Biden voting for passage to break this hypothetical 50-50 tie.

But this isn’t going to happen because the Democratic leadership is basically saying, “We would really love a public option; it’s just that too many people in the party would oppose it. Only 86% of registered Democrats favor a public option, and the support in Congress just isn’t there.”

The “good news” is that the Democrats are going to implement near-universal care by mandating that people buy private insurance or face fines. With a public option, such a mandate is dubious. Without a public option, such a mandate is downright cruel. If the government wants to provide people with a cheaper alternative to private insurance in order to help working class Americans, I’m all for it. But where the fuck does this administration and this Congress get off telling me I have to purchase insurance? I can’t possibly see how that’s constitutional. While the health insurance mandate has been compared to auto insurance mandates, this is an inappropriate comparison. Drivers must buy auto insurance by virtue of having bought cars. Under the health care bill mandate, people would have to buy health insurance by virtue of simply being alive. Not even the broadest interpretation of the Necessary-and-Proper Clause arrives at a justification for mandating business transactions between private parties under such a circumstance. Of course, we’d like to think that if such a law passes, there would be a benefit in having a constructionist majority on the Supreme Court if the mandate were ever challenged and got that far. But the Roberts Court has shown itself to be so rabidly pro-business, I would not put it past the robed reactionaries to rule in favor of the mandate simply because it helps corporations.

In a recent letter to the Democratic Party, I suggested that I might stay home in 2010 if it didn’t clean up its act. Well, the Democrats aren’t going to clean up their act, so you can count me out of the November midterms. And unless Obama starts to push an actual progressive agenda, you can count me out of the 2012 presidential race too. I won’t legitimize this bullshit we call a political system anymore.

- Max

Hick High School Cancels Prom To Avoid Having To Allow In A Lesbian

Forsooth

A Mississippi high school faces a lawsuit over its decision to cancel its prom rather than allow a lesbian high school student attend with her girlfriend…

...At the center of the lawsuit is a memorandum from the school to students, dated February 5, which states that prom dates must be of the opposite sex.

Also, when McMillen expressed a desire to wear a tuxedo to the prom, the superintendent told her only male students were allowed to wear tuxes, according to court documents.

Superintendent Teresa McNeece also told McMillen that she and her girlfriend could be ejected from the prom if any of the other students complained about their presence there, according to the documents.

The prom was canceled after McMillen and the ACLU tried informally to get the school to change its stance.

CNN

You may have noticed that at select points in some of my writings, I trash the American South. Several people have emailed me to complain about my “Northeast liberal elitism.” But this isn’t about elitism. It’s about the South being as backwards as shit. Whether it’s an attempt to teach creationism in science classes, or willfully telling a journalist that they don’t like Obama because “He’s a fucking nigger,” or treating gays like second class citizens, many Southerners of this fine nation have a serious problem. This isn’t to say that most of them are like this, but there sure are enough ignorant redneck fuckwits to give the whole region a terrible reputation.

Such is the case with Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, which apparently is run by people so sexually repressed, that in the 21^st century they cannot bear the sight of two gay students attending a prom. As if the poor girl weren’t feeling ostracized enough by her school’s official policy to exclude her and her partner from the prom, the school has sinisterly cancelled the whole thing. Sane people will consider this episode and determine that it is the school officials who are being ridiculous and inconsiderate. But yours truly has spent some time today on the comments threads of the local Southern news media. The anonymous responses are astounding. Many people commenting from locations in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other red state backwaters have seen fit to blame the lesbian student for the cancellation. There wouldn’t be a problem, one of them says, if only gays wouldn’t try to advance “their perverted lifestyles down all of our throats. Are you really proud of your sickening selves?”

The claim that gays “flaunt it” is a ragged canard. It’s not as if gays go around unwelcomingly hitting on people of the same sex. When homophobics say that gays flaunt themselves, what they’re really complaining about is the fact that more gays are simply out of the closet. The haters liked the good old days when gays were afraid to let it be known who they are. Thankfully, gays are becoming increasingly accepted in American society. And some people just don’t like it.

Why? Who knows? Religion I’m sure plays a large role. Also, people who merely are different have often been the targets of social ridicule, especially in the South. Different religions, different skin colors, different languages, and different sexualities have never played well down there. These are important factors, as is another commonly overlooked motive because of its uncomfortable premise: the theory that homophobia is often (though not always) the product of repressed homosexual desires in the homophobic himself. Think Roy Cohn, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Roy Ashburn, or any other anti-gay religious or political figure who turned out to be a flaming homo.

So whenever I see rabid homophobia on display, I can’t help but ask myself, what’s really going there?

- Max

Guardian Writer Says Child Abuse By Priests Is Totally Overblown. (Did I Just Say "Blown?")

[The Pope’s brother,] Georg Ratzinger, 86, said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday that he slapped pupils as punishment after he took over the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir in the 1964. He also said he was aware of allegations of physical abuse at an elementary school linked to the choir but did nothing about it.

AP

Child abuse in the Catholic Church. Nothing new here. But when I was reading the Guardian’s coverage on this story I came across Andrew Brown’s blog, where he rehashes an old argument about child fucking/hitting by priests. Titled “Catholic abuse in proportion,” Brown wonders, “Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world’s?”

A more absurd or irrelevant question would be hard to formulate. Brown actually attempts to defend the Catholic Church by citing murky statistics on child abuse before concluding, “I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.”

Wow. And to think that for years I have railed against pedophile priests, condemned the Church for covering up their heinous abuses, and have attacked the practice of celibacy for priests, lest their biological urges to engage in sexual intercourse manifest themselves in such assaults. What have I done?

Please. These are priests, not plumbers. If the Catholic Church and its ministers are going to present themselves as the personification of piety and god’s representatives on earth, they ought to expect to be held to a slightly higher standard than the rest of the general population. Indeed, if, “We’re no more likely to fuck your kid than your stockbroker” is the best defense the Church and its apologists have to offer, color me unimpressed. If the leaders of Catholicism are just as moral or immoral as everyone else, which is most certainly the case, what is it for?

- Max

Peter Schiff's Cult Of Capitalism

Nice scythe.

Peter Schiff, who is most famous for correctly predicting the housing collapse and subsequent financial fallout (among several incorrect predictions), has something of a cult following on the internet. Oftentimes his fans are younger people, particularly of the Ron Paul fan club variety, which is to be expected because Schiff was an adviser on Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Schiff himself has recently entered the political fray, running for the Republican nomination in this fall’s senate election in Connecticut.

As with Ron Paul, I admire Schiff’s candor. He does not kowtow to people by making pleasing and uncontroversial statements. One can generally count on Peter Schiff to say exactly what he thinks. However, this is where my admiration for him ends. I have been following his regular video blogs on YouTube for several months now, and I think I get the economic picture that Schiff would like to paint if it were up to him. It isn’t pretty.

Schiff, like most conservatives, thinks government is awful, and that if it would only get out of the way and deregulate, the markets would be able to function uninhibited and purely, and produce optimal economic outcomes. Everything you need to know about Schiff’s economic philosophy is summed up by the man himself in this video. The relevant portion is from 3:20 to 5:20. Schiff is discussing the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which mandated that U.S. minimum wage laws apply (piecemeal) to its overseas territories.

So Schiff thinks that it was wrong for the government to require that American Samoans be paid more than $3-something per hour because all the law did was prompt Star-Kist to lay off hundreds of workers, and Chicken of the Sea to shut down its tuna canning plant altogether.

Let’s just concede the obvious—that the people of American Samoa are worse off for this minimum wage law having been enacted, at least for now. Schiff and other conservatives would chalk up this episode to another instance of government intrusion in the free market that made most everyone worse off.

Or, one could view this ordeal as indicative of a very serious problem in the modern global economy: that there is an ongoing race to the bottom among countries to see who can have the most business-friendly climate. The United States is no longer considered the ideal place to produce clothes, toys, electronics, etc.; not because American workers have gotten incompetent, but because we have pesky labor laws on the books regulating things such as minimum wage and workplace safety conditions. In the age of mass production and expedient international transport, it is much more profitable for even U.S. companies to set up shop in Mexico or Indonesia to produce their widgets, even though Americans are the most insatiable consumers in the world.

The solution for Schiff and others, such as the like-minded porn-stached John Stossel of Fox Business, is to eliminate the minimum wage altogether.

It appears that Stossel is being serious when he asks, “If a minimum wage really does help workers, why be so cheap? Why only raise it to $14 [as one town has done] or $7.50—that’s the new national minimum [sic, it’s actually $7.25]. Why not a hundred dollars an hour?” He then notes that at that level, everyone would realize that people would be hurt, but that even at the lowly rate of $7.25, “the principle is the same.”

No it isn’t. That’s like asking why we don’t have a taxation rate of 90% across the board to increase government revenue. Because it wouldn’t. When it comes to taxation, the idea is to set a rate that will generate enough public revenue to cover operating costs, but not so much as to destroy supply and demand and all means and incentives to produce goods and services. Think of the Laffer Curve. Somewhere between 0% and 100% lies the ideal rate at which to tax people (and businesses). Is there such a thing as the “ideal minimum wage?” Many conservatives would say, “None.” While everyone can agree that if raised to a certain point, the minimum wage would inflict great harm rather than providing an overall benefit, I do not believe $7.25 is that point. Not even close. In fact, in inflation adjusted dollars, the minimum is right where it was in the early 1980s, and we’re still lagging behind the 1950s. So even though people like Peter Schiff and John Stossel talk about the disappearance of entry level jobs such as movie theater ushers and gas-pumpers, the fact is that back in the 1970s, those workers were making more money in real dollars.

For a guy who went to Princeton, Stossel often uses arguments so specious that one wonders how he could think them valid in the first place. Stossel is an unabashed apologist for outsourcing because, he says, that means lower prices for American consumers. Of course, he doesn’t address the issue of the millions of jobs, and billions of dollars in wages lost in America as a result of this. If your job has been outsourced, you may not have the kind of money you used to with which to buy these wonderful, now foreign-made products.

Then there was Stossel’s argument against sharing he once made in a 20/20 episode when he was with ABC. His argument—and I’m not making this up—was essentially:

The refrigerator in the staff room at my work is “shared” and the inside is gross and unclean.

Public restrooms are “shared” and they are also gross and unclean.

Sharing/socialism is bad.

Therefore, private ownership is the answer to everything.

Just as frightening as the undying faith that Schiff, Stossel, and other prominent conservatives have in corporations to collectively run the markets effectively and fairly, is that their message is resonating with people. Sure, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates irresponsibly low for way too long in the early 2000s, leading to a nationwide lending spree, but Schiff wants condemn the bartender who kept on serving the alcoholic. Yes, some fault lies with the barkeep, but ultimately it’s on the drunk to clean up his act. And sometimes, an intervention is needed.

But this isn’t how Schiff sees it. He is an enabler of financial terrorism. We ought not to tax the banks that were bailed out, Schiff and many Republicans say, because they will simply gouge their customers to compensate for the lost revenue. This is likely correct, but what does this say about our financial system? What they’re saying is that we can’t enact financial reform that could cut into banks’ profits because the costs will be passed on to the consumers.

Excuse me, but what the fuck? The idea that we shouldn’t attempt to reform financial services institutions, or energy companies, or HMOs because they’ll take it out on the customers is a very dubious and dangerous rationale. This is financial terrorism straight up: threatening a country or a people with economic harm in order to attain a desired (profitable) outcome—in this case, the maintenance of the status quo. Imagine if after 9/11 America had said, we’re not going to go into Afghanistan because that will only make al Qaeda angrier. What would we think of someone who made that argument? I mean, it’s one thing to make a case against war on the grounds that we shouldn’t do it for moral or practical reasons, but it’s quite another to make that decision based on whether you think your adversary will be pissed off or not.

The fact is, the financial services sector of this country needs serious reform. A year and half after the onset of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, fundamentally, nothing has changed. The “too big to fail” problem has only gotten worse; and over-the-counter derivates, which are an integral part of our casino economy, are very badly in need regulation in the form of a central clearinghouse responsible for approving such transactions.

But incredibly, Americans don’t give a shit about the banks or banking reform. They’re worried about socialism. They’re worried that whatever wealth they have left will be distributed to poor blacks and Mexican immigrants. They’re for some reason worried about their taxes that have either gone down or stayed the same under the present administration. This country may be unreal, but it unfortunately doesn’t surprise me when a guy such as Peter Schiff develops a huge following for his market-knows-best-philosophy, even right on the heels of the real estate bubble burst where the market clearly did not know best. As with government, the fundamental problem with markets is that they rely on human decision-making. By definition, that makes them inherently flawed.

- Max