Now Let's Get It Done!

I am guardedly hopeful. Obama's speech was better than I expected. He said he supports the public option, but he's open to triggers and co-ops. The last part of his speech was really great.

I especially liked his reference to the letter he received from Ted Kennedy:

I received one of those letters a few days ago. It was from our beloved friend and colleague, Ted Kennedy. He had written it back in May, shortly after he was told that his illness was terminal. He asked that it be delivered upon his death....

He expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform – "that great unfinished business of our society," he called it – would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country." [emphasis added]

It was truly a great speech. Given the opportunity to edit it, I would have tweaked it:

But an additional step we can must take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. Let me be clear – it would only be an option only for those who want it. don't have insurance.

Even so, the president demonstrated more support for a public option than I expected. His stated goals are good.

So now the question is, Can he deliver?

Even more importantly, can we?

I believe that the stance Barack Obama took tonight was altered by our activism and our persistence. In spite of his chastisement of Progressives for imbuing the public option with so much importance, I think his support of it was stronger because of indications Americans demand it. I think we did that.

During the election last year, we were just dipping our toes into this online organizing thingy. But clearly our work on health care reform proves that we're getting better at this. We're learning more, we're teaching each other, we're making more and more important connections. We are aggregating our power. How awesome is that?

Tonight I feel guardedly hopeful, not so much because of Obama's speech but because we are mobilizing for real change. I knew when Obama was elected that the really hard work lay ahead of us, and I was worried about whether we'd have the heart and the wherewithal to do it. Tonight, I'm less worried.

Barbara Boxer reported on Rachel Maddow that after the speech, Obama said to her, "Now let's get it done." That was my favorite thing he said all night. Enough talk. Let's have some action.

If you haven't already, tell each of your representatives to support real health care reform. Tell them you insist on a robust public option.

Write letters to local and national newspapers in support of real health care reform with a robust public option.

Particularly if your representative is a member of the Progressive Caucus, ask her or him to publicly commit to voting against any health care that does not contain a robust public option.

If you have other ideas of how to push for meaningful health care reform, please let me know.

Now let's get it done!

A Big Day for Corporatocracy

The Supreme Court is about to decide whether corporations have the same rights as individual citizens. This is something worth paying close attention to, because the ramifications are enormous. The Bill Moyers Journal did a great job of presenting both sides of the argument last week. I urge you to watch the whole thing or read the transcript (or both).

The case in question, which could overturn a hundred years of campaign finance reform, is Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. An editorial in the LA Times written by Doug Kendall, founder and president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank and public interest law firm in Washington, DC, explains:

The case involves a film, "Hillary: The Movie," which sharply attacks Hillary Rodham Clinton and her presidential candidacy. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group, to coincide with the 2008 presidential primary season. The Federal Election Commission saw the movie as no different from a standard-issue attack ad -- just longer -- and considered it subject to restrictions imposed under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law as an "electioneering communication."

Citizens United began as a seemingly inconsequential case about the extent of the FEC's power to regulate such communications, but that was transformed at oral argument in March into a much bigger deal. Citizens United pressed for a sweeping rejection of congressional authority to regulate campaign spending by corporations, and the court's conservative justices were plainly sympathetic to this broad argument [emphasis added].

Kendall goes on to explain that the essential question of the case is whether a corporation has or should have the same rights as an individual. How could you possibly have a healthy democracy if corporations, with their enormous resources, aren't restricted in how they participate in the political process? Does it really make sense to grant corporations the same rights as citizens?

So are we going to let them vote too?

That's where you see the absurdity of the notion of granting corporations the same rights as citizens. Are we going to start handing CEOs special corporate ballots? They probably wouldn't be interested in that, because, of course, one puny little vote wouldn't be enough.

Kendall continues:

In his historic run to the presidency, Barack Obama broke every political fundraising record, raising nearly $750 million from more than a million contributors in 2007 and 2008. Now consider a corporation such as Exxon Mobil. During 2008 alone, Exxon generated profits of $45 billion. With a diversion of even 2% of these profits to the political process, Exxon could have far outspent the Obama campaign and fundamentally changed the dynamic of the 2008 election....

The line between corporations and individuals when it comes to constitutional protections is as old as the United States. The framers wrote the Constitution to protect citizens and the people and never once used the word "corporations."

Early Supreme Court rulings embraced this distinction, holding that the legal rights of a corporation derive from its corporate charter, not the Constitution.

We've been heading down two contradictory roads for some time now. According to Kendall, one road leads to democratic progress, "moving toward broader enfranchisement and more meaningful political participation for individual Americans." The other is the road to greater and greater corporate power and influence. At some point--and this may be it--we will be pulled much more in one direction than the other. There's a tremendous lot at stake.

Our campaign finance laws are puny in the face of the enormous power the corporations wield, addressing only some abuses of corporate power. They need to be strengthened, not overturned. We had all better hope that the Supreme Court does the right thing.

Otherwise that "tap, tap, tap" you hear will be yet another nail being driven into the coffin of democracy.

Whose Side Are You On, Mr. President?

Yesterday in his speech at the AFL-CIO's annual Labor Day picnic, President Obama gave us a little down payment on Wednesday night's speech:

I want a health insurance system that works as well for the American people as it does for the insurance industry. They should be free to make a profit. But they also have to be fair. Security and stability for folks who have health insurance, help for those that don't, the coverage they need at a price they can afford.

Is it just me, or did the last bit sound like an advertisement for health insurance?

Two statements keep running around in my mind: "I want a health insurance system that works as well for the American people as it does for the insurance industry.... They should be free to make a profit."

Now hold on just a cotton-pickin' minute. President Obama is holding up the concerns of the health insurance industry in one hand and the concerns of the American people in the other like there's some kind of parity there, like the two are somehow comparable. Uh, hello?

Could we focus on what will work well for the people of this country, the people who are losing their homes because they can't pay their medical bills, the people stuck in crappy jobs because they're afraid to lose their health insurance, the people being denied care even when they're insured, the people who are dying because their insurance companies won't cover the care they need?

How can these direst of life-and-death circumstances be mentioned in the same breath as the lust of the health insurance industry to make ever-increasing profits? Are we so beholden to the great capitalist machine that profit-making is always our priority?

The pit in my stomach is telling me that I know the answer to that question, but I just can't accept it.

Can you really look us in the eye, Mr. President, and hold the concerns of the health care industry alongside ours? Really? Have you not heard anything we've been saying? Are you not paying attention? What if it was your daughter whose care was denied by one of these modern-day pirates? How would you like her health and well-being held up alongside the concerns of industry stockholders to make a profit?

What I keep hearing is the politicians' deep concern for the health insurance industry. Enough already! Will you quit worrying about them? Quit acting as though their concerns are every bit as legitimate as ours! I don't care how much money they've sunk into your reelection coffers. You can't serve their needs and ours. Are you theirs? Or are you ours? You can't be both.

I don't understand why our health should be treated like it's just another commodity in America's capitalist soup. We keep hearing about how the bogeyman of socialism will rear its ugly head if the American people transform their "wealth care system" into a system that is designed to actually care for the health of the American people. Does every single aspect of our lives have to involve some corporate behemoth making a filthy profit? How many more of us have to die or have our lives ruined because of oblations poured out on the altar of rampant, unchecked capitalism?

Here's my question for you, Mr. President, members of Congress: Whose side are you on? Really? Because you can't be on the side of the health insurance industry and on the side of the American people at the same time. Our interests are diametrically opposed to theirs. You can't be for both. So which is it?

Rules Schmules

My husband, Tom, goes back to work today.

He was fired from his job as an electronics technician at the U.S. Post Office for following safety protocols and instructions from the person who was his supervisor at the time. I kid you not. He was fired for powering down four machines that needed maintenance. The rules are that if there's no mail processing being done at the time, the machines need to be powered down before any maintenance is done.

Ten days earlier Tom had been instructed by a supervisor-at-the-time not to follow those safety protocols. He followed her instructions and then filed a grievance, because he was instructed not to follow safety protocols. Tom was off work the entire following week.

After he came back to work, he was given contrary instructions from another supervisor, so he followed the safety protocol and powered down the machines before beginning work on them.

He was fired, then, for not following instructions that were contrary to safety protocol and had been given to him ten days earlier by someone who was not his supervisor and was not in the building at the time.

All this happened back in April. (I wrote about it here.)

Moreover, management didn't follow its own rules for issuing discipline. Before an employee is fired, there are a number of intermediary disciplinary steps that have to take place. They just skipped those bits.

Tom is a union steward for the American Postal Workers Union, and he's a really good one. The week Tom was fired, another union steward was fired as well, for equally ridiculous reasons, and he was reinstated less than a month later.

We heard word this week that management's step three designee unilaterally reduced Tom's firing to a fourteen-day suspension. So now the union will grieve that.

Since his firing, Tom and the APWU filed a complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA has since slapped a fine on the mail-processing plant for not following clearly stated safety protocols. Touché! So the plant has to pay a fine. Ah, sweet vindication. But what, you might ask, are the consequences for the people involved? Disciplinary action? A dock in pay? A stern warning? No sirree. Not even a slap on the wrist.

In all this time that Tom has been off work, there has been a lot of union work not getting done. Other union workers have picked up some of the slack, but not all of it. The union insists that management follow the rules, and management believes that they don't have to. When they don't follow a rule, the union files a grievance. There are lots of rules. And lots of grievances.

The amazing thing is that there are absolutely no consequences whatsoever for these people not following the rules. So you fired this guy for no good reason, and now he's being reinstated. And the P.O. has to pay him for the work he missed but didn't do. And the P.O. has to pay an OSHA fine. So what? It has no effect whatsoever on the people (or person) who didn't follow the rules.

So if all the union can do is file grievances, grievances that have almost no teeth to them, why oh why would management even care whether those grievances are filed? What they gained from Tom's firing was a few months of respite from the mountain of grievances filed because they don't follow the rules. That's all. This whole thing was just about petty power plays.

To give themselves a break from the overwhelming number of grievances, they fired Tom, for what they knew at the time would be a very limited amount of time. They may have hoped that Tom would lose his house or have his car repossessed or experience some such financial or emotional calamity. I'm happy to report that we're no worse for the wear, no worse whatsoever. We cut back on our spending, dipped a little into our savings, and stopped making any but minimum payments on the credit card. We have weathered the storm. So far anyway.

But alas, today Tom goes back to work today to what can only be described as a hostile work environment. I have no doubt that there are more exciting installments to come.

In a way, the folks in management are right. They don't have to follow the rules. Rules are things with consequences, teeth, ramifications. And there are absolutely no consequences when management doesn't follow the rules. Other than the minor annoyance of a huge pile of grievances.

Don't anybody wonder why the U.S. Post Office is hemorrhaging money. And happy Labor Day!

The Choice (video)

Terrific effort by Lee Stranahan calling on President Obama to do the right thing.

Ninth Inning Fail

White House senior advisor David Axelrod told ABC News today that this is the "9th inning" for the health care reform debate and that "President Obama is getting in the game [uh, about time?] and is 'at the point where he can close this' debate."

Oh really? Axelrod continued:

As to the fate of a government option plan to compete with private insurance, Axelrod suggested the controversial concept is gone but not forgotten: "The spirit that led him to support a public option is still very much at play here and so you know he wants competition. He wants choice.'

Russ Feingold has this to say about this "controversial concept":



The public option is the only way to bring down the skyrocketing costs of American health care. As Feingold says, "Real reform needs a strong public option." So if the public option is dead, so is real health care reform.

But how the hell can it be dead when 77 percent of the American people support it and even 65 percent of Republicans support it (according to an AARP poll)? That's as close as this country will ever come to a consensus. And it's dead????

Nevertheless, indications are that the administration is ready to bail (read: fail) on the public option and thus has declared it "dead" so that no one will pay attention to the fact that they are the ones who are murdering it.

This is change we can believe in only in the most profoundly cynical sense.

There's something much, much worse at work here than our rapacious health care system, and that would be our rapacious political system.

If Obama and the Dems undermine real health care reform, like it sounds like they're going to, then I suggest we encourage progressives like Kucinich and Feingold to organize themselves into a new party, one that is beholden to the people and not corporations.

Because I'm not voting for those damned Republicans any more than I'm voting for those damned Democrats. And I'm not not voting either....

So if the Dems screw this up, it's party time. NEW party time.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I still won't back down.

Which Side Are You On? (video)

So, here it is, our very first homegrown video. What it lacks in polish is made up for by heart. The inestimable chorus is made up of folks who hung around after the church picnic on Sunday, the wind, and a few seagulls.



Undoubtedly we'll get better at this with practice, but hey, this isn't bad for our first attempt. And now that we know how easy it is, there'll be plenty more.

Which Side Are You On?
original version by Florence Reece; new lyrics by Mary Ray Worley
New lyrics © copyright 2009. All rights reserved.

chorus:
Which side are you on? (4x)

Our health care system’s broken
Right here in the USA.
The only ones who can afford to get sick
Are the ones who can afford to pay.

My daddy he was laid off.
He lost his insurance too.
Then he caught pneumonia.
Now he’s singing the foreclosure blues.

When you submit a claim form,
Do you know what they’ll provide?
Will they send it back to you
With a big red stamp “Denied!”

We can’t leave it up to Obama.
He may or may not come through.
If you want this reform to pass,
Then you know it’s up to me and you.

We want the public option.
We’re drawing our line in the sand.
Will you call on Congress
To be strong and take a stand!

We’re tired of the moneyed interests
Calling Washington’s tune.
It’s time for us to shake things up
And send the lobbyists to the moon.

Now health care’s not a privilege.
It is a human right.
And we’re standing on firm moral ground,
And it’s here we’re gonna fight.