Socialists wish Obama was a socialist

Why Obama's the Least Socialistic President in Modern History (And That's a Shame) By Richard (RJ) Eskow, AlterNet Posted on February 18, 2012, Printed on February 19, 2012 LINK The Republican presidential candidates keep calling Barack Obama a socialist. If they're trying to invoke the Red Menace like Republicans of past campaigns, they're a generation too late. Americans between the ages of 19 and 29 have no memory of the Cold War. Today they have a more positive impression of socialism than they do of capitalism. The word “socialism” can be applied to a range of economic models, from Cuban collectivism to the Western European social democracies that are the home of some of the world's most successful corporations. But until this election came along it had never been used to describe someone who expanded the private health insurance system, let a negligent company keep control of the cleanup for an environmental disaster it caused, offered to cut retirement and elder health benefits, and repeatedly insisted that the government should cut costs. This president is less socialistic than most of his predecessors, including many Republicans. The irony is that socialist-inspired policies are popular with Americans, including many Republicans, even if the label is not. Polls suggest that a more “socialist” Obama would also be a more popular candidate, and the same is true of his opponents. Socialisms The word “socialism” is used to describe a spectrum of possible economies ranging from the Scandinavian model, where government involvement co-exists with multinational corporations, to the more communistic Cuban model and the idealistic anarcho-syndicalism of the anti-Franco insurgents in the Spanish Civil War. The social democracy model emphasizes expanded public rights to social services and a more distributive tax base, but leaves ownership of production in capitalist hands. This form of socialism has had a major influence on the governments and economies of Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Finland. It hasn't interfered with the success of multinational corporations like Mercedes-Benz, Nokia, Deutschebank, Barclays Bank, or Ferrari. Socialist ideas have a long history in the United States. Socialist and left-leaning parties were the first to propose a number of ideas that are now considered core American ideals, including civil rights, antipoverty programs, Social Security and Medicare. The Pink Menace But socialism was once linked with the Soviet Union, America's nuclear foe, which gave it an aura of treachery and danger it no longer posseses. The Republicans who call Obama a socialist are using a GOP tactic that reached its zenith in Richard Nixon's 1950 Senate victory against Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon supporters handed out thousands of “Pink Sheet” flyers that year comparing his opponent's voting record to that of socialist-leaning New York City Representative Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio ran on the American Labor Party ticket and belonged to several groups that were regarded as “red.” Douglas considered Nixon's actions thuggery, as did a number of other Americans in both parties. She called him as “a young man in a dark shirt,” which was an indirect allusion to the fascists the US had been fighting five years before. (Upon hearing her remark, Nixon displayed an odd unfamiliarity with human anatomy. “Why, I'll castrate her!” the future president said. He also described Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear.”) Douglas found it hard to believe these attacks could be effective, and some people think her delay in responding to them cost her the election. But they did, and this set the tone for the next six decades of GOP campaigns. Newtradamus Newt Gingrich was the first of the current crop of contenders to attack Obama with the socialist label, as political writer John Nichols reminded me in a recent interview. Gingrich published a book last year titled To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine. Gingrich's publisher called it a “dire warning for America,” which is “at risk for its very survival” after electing “the most liberal president ever.” Gingrich reacted to the GOP's 2010 electoral victories in his book by saying, “The American people rejected the secular-Socialist machine that had seized control of the Federal government.” In fact, one of the reasons Republicans really won in 2010 was because they ran a series of very effective ads around a so-called “Seniors' Bill of Rights” whose key proviso was a direct attack on “socialist” Obama's repeated attempts to negotiate entitlement cuts: “No cuts to Medicare to pay for another program,” the Republicans declared. “Zero.” Yes, these Republicans were defending one of our country's most socialistic, and most popular programs, while accusing their “socialist” opponent of trying to cut it. Gingrich's 2011 book waxes triumphant about recent conservative victories int Europe's three largest economies -- Germany, France and Great Britain. Within 18 months those governments' policies had plunged Europe into a deep recessionary spiral. He singles out the British election as a vote to “reverse years of socialist decay through through a dramatic, Thatcher-like policy of radically shrinking the public sector, slashing government spending, reducing welfare, and restoring public enterprise.” What he didn't say is that Great Britain is now struggling with setbacks in unemployment, wages and growth, and recently weathered a series of nationwide riots sparked by economic conditions. Gingrich was firm in his predictions for Obama in 2011. The president, said Gingrich, would embrace “card check” politics for unions and promote cap-and-trade to slow the ongoing destruction of our fragile ecosystem. Gingrich's predictions proved false as Obama quickly abandoned both initiatives. Nostradamus he isn't. But Gingrich, undeterred by reality, still insists that Obama is imposing a “radical,” “secular/socialist state” on the American people. Red Tide The socialist theme was quickly picked up by the other GOP candidates. “Obama's socialist policies are bankrupting America,” said a Rick Perry TV ad. Michele Bachmann concluded her Iowa campaign by declaring she wouldn't let Obama “implement socialism” in the United States. Rick Santorum accused Obama of not doing enough to fight “militant socialism” around the world (the first draft of his presentation used the phrase “godless socialism”), adding that Obama is a “radical.” Front-runner Mitt Romney was the lone holdout, the only candidate not to label the president with the S-word. But he couldn't hold out forever, especially since both his rivals and the press pressed him about it repeatedly. He tried to avoid the question when he was asked directly whether Obama was a socialist, but finally allowed that the president “takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe.” (Romney pointedly described Europe's “social democrats” as “socialist democrats” for maximum effect.) And despite this year's lofty declarations against personal attacks, John McCain wasn't above a little red-baiting himself in the final weeks of the 2008 campaign. "At least in Europe the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives," he said then. "They use real numbers and honest language.” The Enemy Within In time-honored fashion, the red-baiters soon began to turn on one another. Gingrich described Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate” whose campaign was studying “European socialist ideas.” And a caller to Rush Limbaugh's program even accused Limbaugh, who is above all else a Republican Party operative, of supporting the “socialist” Romney. “If you're going to start throwing the 'socialism' term around there,” Limbaugh answered indignantly, “I'll tell you, these are times of tumult.” Now he tells us. Ron Paul's extreme libertarianism makes him, authentically, the least socialistic candidate in the race. Yet Paul was the only candidate who refused to call Obama a socialist. He's a “corporatist,” said Paul, an assessment with considerably more evidence to support it. Obama's Socialist Scorecard Is Barack Obama a radical socialist, a "corporatist," or something else? A friendly journalist describes him as a “pro-business populist,” and that's certainly been the posture he's tried to take. If “thin-skinned business leaders” ignore his rhetoric and “look at his proposals and record,” writes Jonathan Alter, “they might be pleasantly surprised.” Indeed. John Nichols is the author of a book titled The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism. When asked if Obama is a socialist he laughed and said, “Afraid not.” “In fact,” Nichols added, “Obama is one of the most un-socialistic presidents this country's had in the last 150 years.” “When Barack Obama was asked to reform the healthcare system,” Nichols said, “he rejected all of the models based on social democratic proposals, as well as their American 'single-payer' equivalent, and instead went for insurance reforms reforms that were initially proposed by the (conservative) Heritage Foundation.” (The United States is the only developed nation without a “socialized” healthcare system, and its costs are twice those of many comparable countries.) “There you see him rejecting social democratic ideas and going for a conservative model.” “Look at the Gulf oil spill,” Nichols added, “a real disaster for America and the world. President Obama could have taken the response that Franklin Roosevelt and, I would argue, Dwight D. Eisenhower would have taken. He could have said 'Here's a big corporation that's caused us a huge , disastrous problem, and we cannot trust them to address that problem because of their past and current activities. So we're going to nationalize this problem … control will be handed over to the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies. Then we're going to assess this corporation for the cost of the cleanup.'” “That's a solution with a social democratic overlay,” said Nichols, “but also one that's very much rooted in the way this country's always done things. Obama didn't do that.” Red Dawn Ironically, a more “socialistic” agenda could improve Obama's popularity – even among Republicans! Polls taken during the health reform debate showed that 51 percent of Republican voters wanted a "public option" in the health bill that would allow them to purchase coverage from the "socialist" Medicare system. Even stronger majorities of voters overall supported the public option. But Obama never fought for it, and some reports indicated he had traded it away early on in return for a promise from the for-profit hospital industry that it would not resist the bill aggressively. Other polls have shown that overwhelming majorities of Republican voters, including Tea Party members, oppose cutting Social Security or Medicare in order to reduce the federal deficit. Yet Obama created a “Deficit Commission” and appointed as its co-chairs two politicians who were publicly in favor of doing just that, and he has continued to offer cuts of that nature as part of a "Grand Bargain" with Republican leaders in Congress. A "millionaire's tax" is also popular among Republican voters, who also joined with other Americans in wanting the government to act more decisively to create jobs. If the nation were governed by a referendum of Republican voters -- just Republicans -- it would be more "socialistic" than it has been under President Obama. Since these policies are supported even more strongly by Democrats and independents, a more “socialistic” Obama – one who rejected cuts to Medicare and Social Security, fought more aggressively for a “millionaires' tax,” pushed a public option, and backed a more aggressive jobs agenda – would be more popular with American voters across the political spectrum. Red Republicans It's proven popular with previous presidents from both parties. In fact, based on their policies, most Republican presidents of the last century were more “socialistic” than Barack Obama. Eisenhower built the federal highway system and presided over the IRS when the top marginal tax rate for high earners was 91 percent. Nixon proposed a minimum guaranteed income for all Americans, which he called a “negative income tax," without any Clinton-era preconditions like "workfare." It would have applied to all families with children, and passed Congress but failed in the Senate. Nixon also imposed wage and price controls in 1971to control inflation. These controls, while not considered traditionally “socialistic,” were a radical imposition of state control over the private-sector economy. Even Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Crash of 1929 and is often contrasted with FDR, described himself as a “progressive.” He expanded the civil service, proposed a Department of Education and a guaranteed pension for all Americans, enlarged the national park system, ended private oil leases on government land, and formed an antitrust division within the Justice Department. And, much as it irritates Republicans to be reminded of it, Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times. Obama has proposed a reasonable $476 billion program of infrastucture repair, but he's avoided the kinds of bold initiatives put forward by his Republican predecessors: No Hoover-like litany of progressive reforms, no major public projects like Eisenhower's highways, no Nixon-style negative income tax. And he certainly hasn't responded to our ongoing economic crisis with any state interventions on the scale of Nixon's wage and price controls. Socialism's Super Salesmen All this name-calling may not be helping the GOP, but there may be another surprise beneficiary: Socialism. The once-stigmatized ideology has become more acceptable since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Pew Research Center reports that 31 percent of Americans have a favorable response to the term, while 61 percent respond negatively. The public's feelings about capitalism soured slightly in 2011, with approval/disapproval shifting from 52/37 to 50/40. What's much more striking is the fact that, for the first time, more young people think favorably of socialism than they do of capitalism. Forty-nine percent of young people aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, while 43 percent see it negatively. Twenty months ago those numbers were reversed, making this a dramatic shift in youth opinion. Which raises the question: Are today's Republican presidential candidates socialism's best salesmen? Of course, many factors could be driving young people's improving opinion of socialism. Youth unemployment is at record highs, and they can see that little is being done to change that. The Occupy movement has highlighted the ills of unfettered capitalism. But could they also be watching the comic-opera figures on the GOP debate stage and being drawn to anything that group dislikes? Nichols thinks so. “When they hear Republican politicians ranting and raving about socialism,” he said, “young people may be thinking, 'If these yahoos are against it, it can't be that bad.' At the very least, I think it's opened up a great deal of interest in socialism as a alternative.” Socialism's Return? Nichols notes that socialist parties were once part of a vigorous American debate and government's role in society. He believes that socialism should re-enter the mainstream and serve the same purpose on the left that libertarianism serves on the right. There are even places where the two ideologies can collaborate, like civil liberties and foreign policy. As Nichols notes, many of today's mainstream ideas were first articulated by either libertarian or socialist thinkers. And as Obama has embraced more seemingly “socialist” mainstream ideas – tax structure, or greater infrastructure spending – his popularity has risen. Whatever happens, one thing's already clear: Love him or not, Barack Obama is no socialist. But socialist-inspired ideas remain as popular – and as American – as ever. That's something politicians in both parties would do well to remember. Richard Eskow is a writer, a senior fellow with the Campaign for America's Future, and the host of a weekly radio show, "The Breakdown." © 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/154175/

George Washington and and first congress first mandated health insurance

LINK

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

"In 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm."

Einer Elhauge on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 in a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine

Harvard Law professor says early Congress mandated health insurance for seamen and gun ownership for most men

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One complaint about President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is that it forces uninsured people to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty -- an argument the Supreme Court will consider when it takes up challenges to the health-care law in oral arguments March 27 and 28. If the court upholds the act, critics argue, what's to stop Congress from forcing us to buy, say broccoli.

Harvard Law School professor Einer Elhauge focused on that issue in a Jan. 5, 2012, commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "The Irrelevance of the Broccoli Argument against the Insurance Mandate."

Some people, he said, "argue that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have envisioned a congressional power to force purchases. However, in 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves.

"In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers."

We wondered whether those early Congresses -- some of whose members helped draft the Constitution -- did indeed mandate health insurance and gun purchases.

First, we wanted to see whether that first Congress was actually "packed with framers."

Fifty-five men are considered the framers. During the first Congress in 1790, only 20 of the 91 senators and representatives were framers. That's not exactly packing them in.

Then we contacted Elhauge about the other parts of his claim. He referred us to three pieces of legislation.

First was the 1790 law, passed by that first Congress, which applied to any U.S. ship that was at least 150 tons or with a crew of at least 10. It required the master or commander to either have a supply of on-board medicines (with instructions) or provide "all such advice, medicine, or attendance of physicians, as any of the crew shall stand in need of in case of sickness" and do it "without any deduction from the wages of such sick seaman or mariner."

Sounds like mandatory health care to us.

Then, in 1792, a Congress that included 17 framers passed a law requiring nearly every "free able-bodied white male citizen" age 18 to 44, within six months, "provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges," along with balls and gunpowder. A rifle could be substituted. The purpose was to establish a uniform militia.

Again, that sounds like a mandated purchase to us.

Finally, in 1798, a Congress that included five framers expanded the health coverage mandate, requiring every ship owner or master coming into a port to pay 20 cents per seaman for every month each worker had been employed.

The funds, which could be withheld from the seamen, were used "to provide for the temporary relief and maintenance of sick or disabled seamen, in the hospitals or other proper institutions now established" in the port. Leftover funds were used to create hospitals for those mariners.

How did the framers vote on these laws?

There was no roll call for the House and Senate bills requiring health care for seamen. But on the proposal mandating the purchase of musket, firelock or rifle as part of the larger bill to establish a uniform militia, 10 of the 14 framers whose votes were recorded endorsed the measure.

One side note: In November 1792, an attempt was made in the House to reconsider the weapon requirement in the militia bill because some people were complaining that it was too onerous, an argument that echoes complaints from critics of the new health-care law. The proposal was defeated 6 to 50. The vote among framers was 1 to 6.

It should also be noted that the president who signed the first two of these laws was our Founding Father-in-Chief, George Washington.

Elhauge, in an e-mail, stood by his characterization that the first Congress was "packed" with framers, saying, "20 framers sounds pretty packed to me. There were only 55 delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention, so 20 is around 40 percent of all the framers present in that Congress."

We disagree. The issue is not how many framers went to Congress, but how many members of Congress were framers. And you can't pack a meeting when you only account for 22 percent of the representatives.

More importantly, he said, "I don’t think anyone objected to any of these laws on constitutional grounds, which presumably someone would have if it was obvious that the original understanding was that such an obligation would be unconstitutional."

Our ruling

Harvard Law professor Einer Elhauge said that early Congresses, particularly the first Congress, had no qualms about forcing purchases.

Our research confirmed that. Congress required merchant ship owners to purchase medicines or provide health care for their workers. Seamen were later taxed to pay for what might be regarded today as an 18th-century health maintenance organization to provide for hospital care. And most able-bodied men were required to purchase weaponry for their service in the militia.

Although he correctly characterized the laws, to say that the framers of the Constitution "packed" that first Congress is too much of a stretch. "Packed" means at least a majority; 22 percent is not a majority.

For that reason, we rule his statement Mostly True.

(An earlier version of this item incorrectly reported that Washington signed all three bills. John Adams, a founding father who was not a framer because he was in Europe when the U.S. Constitution was written, signed the 1798 legislation.)

(Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.)

Comparing the Modern Tea Party to the Original

By Barbara Smith LINK

Barbara Smith is the author of "The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America," just issued by The New Press.

In light of the recent anniversary of the original Tea Party, shouldn’t we consult history to clarify what the Boston brouhaha of 1773 was really about? Here are some things we would do well to remember today:

• There was little that was “conservative” about the event. A mob seized and destroyed private property. Conservative interests at the time deplored it, and the respectable descendants of the Revolutionary generation did their best to forget it when they wrote up their official accounts of the Revolution.

• It was not all about taxes. The colonists who dumped tea in Boston harbor did not oppose taxation by representative governments. They routinely voted in town meetings to support the poor and pay for common goods such as roads or public schools. From time to time they dug into their pockets to pay off public debts created by expensive wars. They did not worry much about the likelihood of taxes going to “freeloading” poor people or immigrants, because they knew that government is rarely controlled by the poor or the newcomer. Far more likely—far more dangerous—was an alliance between government and the already wealthy and well-connected.

• It was about the power of private interests. As colonists saw it, Parliament had been corrupted by the influence of money. First, opulent West Indies planters had promoted the Sugar Act to boost their profits. Wealthy Britons had supported the Stamp Act in order to cut their own taxes. Now shareholders of the East India Company hoped to reap a windfall off a monopoly on the tea trade. All these measures served special interests at the expense of ordinary colonists in North America. Rather than defending the tax breaks of the wealthy or the monopoly privileges of private companies, the original Patriots championed the wellbeing of middling households.

• It was about the obligation of government to regulate economic transactions. Eighteenth-century Patriots assumed a principle of public activism. Samuel Adams explained in a Boston newspaper: Governments might oppress the people by grabbing too much power, but oppression also occurred when governments were too weak. Government existed precisely “to protect the people and promote their prosperity.” In normal times, people expected government to limit monopolies and excessive profit-taking. In the imperial crisis, Patriots insisted that countless transactions—not only tea sales—should come under public scrutiny and serve the common good. What justified destroying the East India Company’s tea was the principle that public good trumped corporate profit.

• It was about the distribution of wealth. Americans’ ancestors had been uprooted from the British countryside as great landowners amassed more and more of the land. In North America, many English settlers had achieved a sort of middling security. Now that security was threatened. Parliament was taking the side of the rich, and some rich Americans were taking the side of Parliament. The danger was the impoverishment of everyone else. The Patriots believed that a rough economic equality was necessary to maintaining liberty.

Viewed accurately, the original Patriots would sadly disappoint today’s Tea Party activists, who promote a far different political philosophy. Of course no one today needs to agree with eighteenth-century ideas, and we know that the Patriots had their profound flaws. But we must object when present-day interests sidestep good-faith discussion of the merits of their position by misappropriating the founding generation. The principles of today’s Tea Partiers may (or may not) be correct, but they cannot establish it through sleight of hand, blithely invoking the founders while ignoring those founders’ ideas. The rest of America should not be intimidated by unfounded claims that Tea Partiers are the “real America” or that their values are the ones that originally won American freedom. Those claims fly in the face of history, and they contribute little to our ability to address the massive problems that we face as a nation.

Forgotten Successes of Obama

The Untold Story Of The Actual Obama Record

Andrew Sulllivan, The Daily Beast

20 Oct 2011LINK

[Re-posted from earlier today.]

I can't put it better than this longtime Dish reader:

Personally, I am praying that Obama's messaging improves drastically. (It has failed on multiple occasions - not the least of which was during August/September of 2008.)

The truth is that this President has done a good job in what has been one of the most difficult periods of modern history. He saved the economy from ruin (until the Tea Party took over Congress) with a stimulus that was as large as possible given the political realities, presided over a stock market that fairly quickly recouped many of its losses, presided over almost consecutive monthly increases in private sector job growth (unfortunately balanced by monthly decreases in public sector jobs which I attribute to the GOP further starving government), enacted the only meaningful healthcare reform ever in our history, passed financial reform (no matter what the Left says, he did this), saved the auto industry (which Romney is on record opposing), fired the first salvo of the Arab Spring with his address in Cairo no less, drawn down our footprint in Iraq in a responsible way (and headed toward almost total withdrawal), stopped numerous terrorist attacks in this country, stopped torture as policy, repealed DADT, joined the international community in a measured and responsible way to bring down an odious tyrant in Qaddafi, and killed a whole generation of al Qaeda leaders. And taking out Osama bin Laden the way he did will go down as one of the bravest military actions in American history.

I know this President is not popular, and it is very unpopular to defend him in such a way. I don't care. For this country to dump him for anyone on the other side would be a terrible thing. Progress is slow and painful, but we are doing it. Is that fashionable to say? No. Again, I don't care.

Amen. And the way in which the ADD media simply jumps to the next cycle of spinmanship only furthers the amnesia. But the Obama administration also shares some of the blame.

Many of them have been too focused on governing to explain what the fuck they're doing. There's a technocratic arrogance to them at times that is too blind to winning and sustaining arguments and narratives. And this is kinda mind-blowing because the record is so remarkable in retrospect.

If you'd told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history ... well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.

But we are where we are - and the economic pain is real and the president must take his lumps. The good news for those of us who still back Obama and hope for his re-election is that even with all this positive record essentially dismissed and little of it capitalized on politically, Obama is still neck and neck with any likely opponent. And he is his own best messager.

At some point, he needs to shuck off the restraint, and tell the actual story of the last three years - against the fantastic and self-serving lies and delusions we keep hearing in Republican debates and Beltway chatter. If he does it with panache, he won't need a jumpsuit onto an aircraft carrier. And many of his missions may even be accomplished.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with people at a fire station October 19, 2011 in Chesterfield County, Virginia. Obama was on the final day of his three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia to push for his Jobs Bill. By Jay Paul/Getty Images.)

Thomas Paine's Liberal Agenda

"Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age." Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.

"It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread... pay to every such person of the age of fifty years ... the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty... This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right." Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.

"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it." Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.

Beck Lies About NYT

Glenn Beck Lies About The NY Times and Mussolini

February 09, 2011 6:13 pm ET by Simon Maloy of Mediamatters.org LINK

Earlier tonight on his Fox News program, Glenn Beck was trying to make a point about how when the free market "allegedly" collapses, people rush to declare capitalism dead, just like in the 1920s. Beck's evidence was a New York Times article from 1923 which, according to Beck, "heaped praises" on Benito Mussolini. Note, as you watch the video, the presence of an ellipsis at the end of the quote Beck presents:

I think you know what's coming.

The full October 7, 1923, New York Times article (behind the Times' paywall) was actually quoting "American magazine writer" Isaac F. Marcosson, who had "just returned from a four months' trip through the Near East and Europe." Marcosson's assessment of Mussolini was not nearly as charitable as Beck led his viewers to believe.

The italicized portion is what Beck chose to leave out when making his accusation:

"Mussolini is a Latin Roosevelt who first acts and then inquires if it is legal. He has been of great service to Italy at home, but as an international factor Mussolini is just as great a danger to the peace of Europe as the Kaiser's sword used to be at Berlin. In my opinion the Corfu incident was a death blow to the League of Nations. If the League had acted peremptorily and insisted on arbitration instead of permitting Mussolini to bring Europe to the brink of another war its prestige would have been assured."

So to recap, Beck attributed a quote to the New York Times when, in fact, it was the New York Timesquoting someone else. And the quote, which he truncated to claim was laudatory of Mussolini, actually cast the Italian fascist as a warmonger and the greatest threat to European peace since World War I.

This isn't an innocent mistake. Beck is a liar, and for all his exhortations that his audience "do their own research," he seems pretty comfortable assuming that they're too lazy to actually do so.

Obama lowered income taxes

For 3rd Straight Year, Americans Paying Less In Federal Taxes Than They Did Under Bush

By Ben Armbruster on Feb 8th, 2011 at 9:50 am LINK

The rise of the Tea Party — “Tea” standing for “Taxed Enough Already” — was inspired by the myth that Americans were suffering under an oppressive tax-raising regime of President Obama. Yet the reality is quite the opposite. As Obama noted in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly on Sunday, “I didn’t raise taxes once. I lowered taxes over the last two years.” Yesterday, the Congressional Budget office provided the numbers to back that claim up, the AP reports:

[A]s a share of the nation’s economy, Uncle Sam’s take this year will be the lowest since 1950. [...] And for the third straight year, American families and businesses will pay less in federal taxes than they did under former President George W. Bush, thanks to a weak economy and a growing number of tax breaks for the wealthy and poor alike. [...]

But in the third year of Obama’s presidency, federal taxes are at historic lows. … in the current budget year, federal tax receipts will be equal to 14.8 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, the lowest level since Harry Truman was president.”

The AP adds that even though federal income tax rates have remained unchanged, “many taxpayers are seeing their bills drop under Obama because of more generous tax credits for college students, working families, homebuyers and the working poor.”

HCR Mandate is "a convergence in a period of intense polarization"

The Justice Will See You Now

The fate of Obama’s health-care law may rest with one man.

Tim Sloan / AFP-Getty Images

Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court in October.

As of now, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is the most pivotal health-care policy thinker in America. Following district court Judge Roger Vinson’s Jan. 31 ruling that declared President Obama’s health-care-reform law unconstitutional, the plan has a solid 2–2 record in the federal courts: two district judges have ruled for it, and two against. The odds are very good that it will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court. And once it gets there, odds are the bill’s fate will come down to one person: Justice Kennedy.

None of that is certain, of course. Perhaps the issue will be resolved at the circuit-court level. Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts will side with the administration and Kennedy won’t be the swing vote. Or perhaps an asteroid will hit the earth, rendering tweaks to the U.S. health-care system moot.

But probably not. Health-care reform is likely to come down to Kennedy—in particular, his views on the so-called individual mandate, which requires all those who can afford it to purchase health insurance. And here’s the irony of the whole thing: the individual mandate was a policy that Democrats adopted precisely in order to attract moderate Republicans like, well, Anthony Kennedy. If it gets rejected, what’s likely to come next is going to be a whole lot less congenial to conservatives.

“Health care is unlike other commodities,” Walter Dellinger, who served as solicitor general to Bill Clinton, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. “There is nothing else in our economy where an individual who has made no preparation can go in and get $1 million of goods and services passed on to them at taxpayer expense.” That means it struggles with free riders: people who would have society pay for their care, rather than pay for it themselves.

One solution is single-payer health care, in which everyone pays taxes and everyone gets government-provided health-care insurance. But conservatives aren’t big fans of replacing private industries with government monopolies. So in 1991, a group of conservative academics proposed an alternative: the individual mandate, which says that everyone who can afford health-care insurance has to buy it. That means no free riders, no healthy people waiting until they get sick to buy insurance or stick the rest of us with the costs of their care. “We did it because we were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance, which isn’t market-oriented, and we didn’t think was a good idea,” says Wharton economist Mark Pauly, one of the idea’s authors.

For the next 18 years or so, that’s the role the individual mandate played. It was what Republicans proposed as a smaller-government alternative to the health-care plans favored by liberals. In November 1993, Sen. John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island, proposed the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act. The legislation became the GOP’s semiofficial response to President Bill Clinton’s health-care bill, and it was eventually co-sponsored by such influential Republicans as Bob Dole, Richard Lugar, Chuck Grassley, and Orrin Hatch. The other major Republican alternative, the Consumer Choice Health Security Act, included Jesse Helms and Trent Lott as cosponsors, and also included an individual mandate.

Neither bill went anywhere, but they cemented the individual mandate as a central feature of Republican health-care thinking. In Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s 2005 health-care plan used an individual mandate. In the Senate, Utah Republican Bob Bennett joined with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden to offer the Healthy Americans Act, which included an individual mandate and attracted more bipartisan support than any other universal-coverage bill in history. In the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, Barack Obama actually opposed the individual mandate—though he reversed himself after the election, once his policy advisers had convinced him of the policy’s worth. As recently as June 2009, Grassley was telling Fox News that there was a “bipartisan consensus” in favor of the individual mandate. “That’s individual responsibility,” he said, “and even Republicans believe in individual responsibility.”

But when Republicans failed to stop Obama’s health-care law in Congress, they decided to try convincing the courts that the individual mandate represented something new and unprecedented: a regulation of economic inactivity. The Constitution’s Commerce Clause gives Congress authority to regulate your actions when you’re engaged in commerce, argue these conservatives, but not when you’re not engaged in commerce—like when you’re choosing not to buy something. Someone deciding not to buy something is, almost by definition, not engaged in commerce, the argument goes.

That strikes many health-care policy experts as an oddly narrow understanding of what the individual mandate does in the context of the free-rider dilemma. As 38 of them—including a few Nobel Prize winners—wrote in a brief to the court, “There is no such thing as ‘inactivity’ or non-participation in the health care market.” Eventually, we all end up as participants in the health-care system, whether we want to or not. The question is simply whether we participate responsibly or irresponsibly—whether we pay for ourselves or have others pay for us.

It will likely fall to Kennedy to resolve this dispute. But some court watchers say his swing vote could produce a dramatic result—regardless of which way he votes. As Jeff Toobin, author ofThe Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, told me, “He swings for the fences.” The bill is likely to be totally fine—or Kennedy is likely to push back broadly against the theory of federal power underlying it.

Oddly enough, Kennedy, the presumed moderate on the court, could usher in an age of immoderation. The individual mandate in the Democrats’ health-care law is an example of policy convergence in a period of intense polarization: despite the vitriol, the two parties are closer together on policy questions than they’ve been in the past. Democrats now often attempt to achieve through market mechanisms what they used to seek through government takeovers. Their adoption of a health-care idea that conservatives supported during most of the last 20 years is only the latest example.

But now that’s exactly what’s getting them into trouble. And if Kennedy moves to broadly strike down the approach, the health-care debate will turn back to the big-government solutions that conservatives spent so long trying to persuade Democrats to give up.

As Harvard law professor Charles Fried, who served as Reagan’s solicitor general, told the Senate Judiciary Committee, no one could have argued that a government-run, single-payer system would be unconstitutional. Medicare proved that. (Fried, by the way, believes the individual mandate is “clearly constitutional.”) So that’s one point in big government’s favor.

The other reason is that expanding public programs, unlike regulating private actors, can be passed through the “reconciliation process”—which means it can’t be filibustered. After watching the GOP turn against policy ideas so many of its members had previously supported, Democrats are pretty clear about the fact that bipartisanship on big issues like health care is impossible in our polarized political system. So they’ll stick to policies that they can get done with 51 votes, as opposed to policies that need 60. The age of immoderation will have begun.