Jasper Joins Two Protests

Originally published as a March 29, 2010 webcomic for Everyday Citizen

The health care reform bill just passed last week and it’s a good time to reflect on the struggles of the past few months. It was a long and drawn out process, with a lot of compromises and points where it seemed like the bill wouldn’t be passed. There were Tea Party protests, the loss of the 60 Democratic votes in the Senate with the surprising election of a Republican in Ted Kennedy’s old seat, and much misinformation about “death panels” and “socialism” were attached to this bill. I followed the journey of this health care reform bill for the past few months, and it was frequently exasperating, but it was also very much like a fascinating political soap opera for me. I had never followed the process of a major initiative this closely before and really learned a lot about the political process.

Many progressives were disappointed with Barack Obama during these past few months for not being more vigorous in fighting for the public option and for following a fairly centrist path in this first year of his administration. I was a bit disappointed at Obama’s seeming passivity during the early part of the health care debate, but I really wasn’t that surprised at his early centrist path. Several progressives had been writing that Obama’s presidency would take a more centrist path unless progressive grassroots activists agitate and push Obama and the country in a more progressive political direction.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s campaign platform was fairly center left. It was moderately liberal, but in areas like health care reform, financial reform, and climate change, his policies weren’t as progressive as Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, John Edwards or Joe Biden. Obama’s ideas centered on reforming the economic system, not changing it, so he wouldn’t challenge corporations to the extent that many progressives would like. In the health care reform debate, for instance, Obama wanted to avoid the conflict that President Clinton had in 1994 with health insurance companies that scuttled Clinton’s attempt at health care reform, so Obama early on negotiated with the insurance companies to neutralize them as a threat.

The push of the Tea Party activists and the pressure of a united Republican front scared the more centrist Democrats into scuttling the public option. Though Obama has progressive sympathies, he will continue to go down a more centrist path unless progressive activists make as much noise as their tea party counterparts. John Nichols wrote in the January 2009 edition of the Progressive Magazine:

It is reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many fundamental issues. He has said as much.

It is equally reasonable for progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it.

In the December 2008 edition of The Progressive, Jim Hightower makes a similar point.

Like fresh poured concrete, the shape of Obama’s Presidency is going to set up quickly, and we can’t be lulled into thinking that casting a ballot is all that democracy requires of us. People who really want change can’t just crank back in their La-Z-Boys, trusting Obama to do the heavy lifting for us.

Wall Street, the war machine, corporate chieftains, Republican Congress critters, rightwing yackety-yackers, weak-kneed Democrats, and other powerful forces of business-as-usual policies will be all over him. They are the insiders, and intend to shape him in their mold.

We have to be the counterforce- an aggressive and vociferous Loyal Opposition pushing insistently and persistently from the outside. Obama was the candidate of change, but he’ll be the President of change only if we buck him up and back him up.

I think significant social change occurs when radicals agitate for change from outside the system and liberal reformers work for change inside the system. Jim Hightower made a good point that there are many outside powerful forces that will be fighting any attempts at change, and that the only thing that can countervail that is an active and involved progressive grassroots movement.

If we glance at history, it is only when a strong enough radical agitation takes place to change attitudes and assert constant pressure can liberal reformers enact reforms within the system. During the 1770s and 1780s, for instance, some of the Founding Fathers, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, tried to pass legislation to gradually abolish slavery in all the states in the union, but the Quakers and other antislavery groups at the time were not influential enough to pressure the government for change. It was only the persistent efforts of radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Sarah and Angelina Grimke to lead protests and organize people to the abolitionist cause that pushed Abraham Lincoln and Republicans like Charles Sumner to abolish slavery.

Radical suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone worked from the convening of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution to get women the right to vote. Radicals like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs led strikes among workers that pushed Progressives in government to enact laws to improve worker conditions, end child labor, and institute a 40 hour work week. In the 1960s and 1970s, Civil Rights activists, Feminist activists and Gay Rights activists led protests and acts of civil disobedience that lead to liberal legislation to protect the rights of women, minorities and the LGBT community.

Frederick Douglass commented on the philosophy of reform in a famous 1857 speech:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

In the past, I’ve had limited experiences in getting involved to try to enact some change for our society. In the 1990s, I was the secretary of the part-timers SEIU union at my work. I would up being secretary because no one else wanted to take the position, but I enjoyed the position and learned a lot.

I really didn’t do much except take notes of meetings, but I got to see up close some of the negotiations between our union leaders and the city officials, and saw how the union really worked to improve the conditions of the part time workers. The leaders of the unions were Bob Balmanno, Joan Coston, Juanita Harris, and Fran Shimozaki, and I really admired how they would take the time to listen to people’s grievances, talk to supervisors to try to solve problems, and negotiate for benefits. I was lucky to have been involved in the union during the tech boom, when the city’s budget was healthy and negotiations between the city and the union were more friendly. In these tough economic times, when many city budgets are suffering from massive deficits, I assume that meetings between unions and city governments are a lot more tense.

During these past few months, I decided to get more involved in the health care debates than just making cartoons and writing blogs. I was partly inspired by my anger at some of the tea party protests during August of last year, when angry opponents of health care reform were making a lot of noise in town hall meetings and were making racist comments about President Obama.

I was also inspired by reading some of the blogs at Everyday Citizen, particularly a blog by Pamela Jean and a blog by Gerald Britt on the importance of getting involved beyond just voting. And I was inspired by some of my artist and poet heroes who were also activists, like Diego Rivera, Ralph Fasanella, Grace Paley, and Muriel Rukeyser.

So in the past couple of months, I attended a vigil, a rally and volunteered in a phone bank. I emailed and called my Congresswoman and two Senators to thank them for their support of health care reform. I think the most enriching thing that I’ve gotten out of this involvement has been just to talk to individuals and hear their stories about why they support health care reform.

A lot of the stories were rather sad. A woman went through chemotherapy and struggled with her insurance company to make payments. A wife talked about the struggles she had with the insurance companies to cover her husband’s medical problems. A man talked about how his company offers the cheapest insurance that really doesn’t offer good coverage.

I also met social justice heroes who dedicate their lives for the betterment of the poor and the marginalized. I met Father Bill Leininger, who met Dorothy Day and marched with Cesar Chavez and has recently join in marches to support janitors working for Cisco and to support Wal-Mart employees. I met the Raging Grannie, a group of older women who fight for economic justice, peace issues and the rights of minorities and the LGBT community. I met members of the group West Valley for Change, a Democratic group that fights for progressive ideas in the Democratic Party in Silicon Valley.

Though I’ve been angry at some of the things that have emanated from the Tea Party movement, I have to admire them for their passion and their willingness to get involved and fight for what they believe in. They are doing what people in the Left should be doing. I read a recent interview by Noam Chomsky in the April 2010 that made me look at the Tea Party in a new way. Chomsky said in the interview:

The tea party thing is a real sign of the failure of the left. Those people, they’re a mixed group, but many of them- I would say probably most of them- are the people who ought to be organized by the left. These are people with real grievances. For the past 30 years- years of financialization and neo-liberalism- for the majority, wages have stagnated. Benefits, which were never very great, have declined. Working hours have shot way up. They’ve gone into debt to try to preserve the consumerist lifestyle that’s rammed down their throats by the advertising industry. So they’re in bad shape. Not Third World-style bad shape, but bad shape by the standards of the way a rich, industrial country is supposed to be.

Those are the things the left ought to be organizing around. Right now, people are very upset, and rightly, about the giveaway to the banks and the high unemployment. If you look at unemployment figures, which are always understated, in the manufacturing industry it’s back to the level of the Great Depression. And people are not going to get those jobs back. So they have a right to be mad, but the left is not offering them anything.

I’ve met a friend who is Tea Party person. I had a conflict with her over her views but I eventually reconciled with her and have to admit, in spite of our different political points of view, I admire her involvement in local politics. I think one of the great strengths in this American democracy is the clash of ideas that comes from a free and open debate. It’s important for those of us who are liberals and progressives to argue the merits of economic justice, environmental protection, peace, and for equal rights for minorities, women, and the LGBT community.

I end this blog with an excerpt from a speech that Bobby Kennedy made in Berkeley, California on October 22, 1966. He said:

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason, and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society. It will belong to those who see that wisdom can only emerge from the clash of contending views, the passionate expression of deep and hostile beliefs. Plato said: “A life without criticism is not worth living.”

This is the seminal spirit of American democracy. It is this spirit which can be found among many of you. It is this which is the hope of our nation.

For it is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from.

We dissent from the fact that millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich.

We dissent from the conditions and hatreds which deny a full life to our fellow citizens because of the color of their skin.

We dissent from the monstrous absurdity of a world where nations stand poised to destroy one another, and men must kill their fellow men.

We dissent from the sight of most of mankind living in poverty, stricken by disease, threatened by hunger, and doomed to an early death after a life of unremitting labor.

We dissent from cities which blunt our senses and turn the ordinary acts of daily life into a painful struggle.

We dissent from the willful, heedless destruction of natural pleasure and beauty.

We dissent from all those structures- of technology and of society itself- which strip from the individual the dignity and warmth of sharing in the common tasks of his community and his country.

These are among the objects of our dissent. Yet we must, as thinking men, distinguish between the right of dissent and the way we choose to exercise that right. It is not enough to justify or explain our actions by the fact that they are legal or constitutionally protected. The Constitution protects wisdom and ignorance, compassion and selfishness alike. But that dissent which consists simply of sporadic and dramatic acts sustained by neither continuing labor or research- that dissent which seeks to demolish while lacking both the desire and direction for rebuilding, that dissent which contemptuously or out of laziness, casts aside the practical weapons and instruments of change and progress- that kind of dissent is merely self-indulgence. It is satisfying perhaps to those who make it.

But it will not solve the problems of our society. It will not assist those seriously engaged in the difficult and frustrating work of the nation. And, when it is all over, it will not have brightened or enriched the life of a single portion of humanity in a single part of the globe.

All of us have the right to dissipate our energies and talent as we desire. But those who are serious about the future have the obligation to direct those energies and talents toward concrete objectives consistent with the ideals they profess. From those of you who take that course will come the fresh ideas and leadership, which are the compelling needs of America.

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

A Reunion Cartoon
A Cartoon on Government and the Market Economy
Bob the Nerd Vampire
Jasper Debates War
Jasper Finds His Way Home
Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Jasper Protests The War

Originally published as a September 7, 2009 webcomic for Everyday Citizen

Over the years, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been somewhat of an arm chair liberal. I’ve talked a lot with my friends about politics and social change, and I’ve complained a lot about the things that are wrong with our society. Yet I haven’t really volunteered much to try to make any changes in our society. My brother and his wife put me to shame in this sense. Over the years, they have taken part in protests for immigrant rights and to fight the invasion of Iraq, and they are now working with the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports to reduce pollution in the Ports of southern California. Right now they are working on a postcard campaign to persuade local politicians and Congress to support the Clean Trucks program.

Attached is the copy of the postcard and here is the website for more information about the Coalition: cleanandsafeports.org. I deeply admire them for their activism and willingness to get involved to try to improve their community and their country.

Last week I decided to attend my first vigil. It was a vigil on health care reform on September 2, 2009 at the corner of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Winchester Road in San Jose, California. I went with my friend Dave, who officiated my wedding with Lisa 4 years ago, and is a passionate liberal and a former nurse. When I was researching health care reform to try to form an opinion, I would ask people that I knew in the health care field what their opinions were. Dave has definite opinions of the health care debate.

It was a fun vigil. Several people were there for the first time, and I think everyone was invigorated to meet other people who shared the same passion for health care reform. During the vigil, a large group of people lined themselves at the corner of the street and waved signs at passing cars. If the cars approved of the message of universal health care, they would honk their horns. At the same time, the organizer of the event would allow various individuals to go to the microphone and tell of their own individual stories about their experiences being sick and the financial toll that they suffered. As the night encroached, we lighted candles.

I was amazed at how many cars honked their horns in support of health care reform. A lady next to me, who participated in past vigils protesting the war in Iraq, mentioned that there were far more cars honking their horns for health care reforms than honked their horns for peace. The people who were participating in the vigil were very diverse, with many different nationalities, age groups, and an even mix of men and women. Dave and I met unexpectedly met some friends whom we hadn’t seen in over a year.

A highlight for me was in meeting Father Bill Leininger. When I first talked to him, he mentioned that in the past he had marched with Cesar Chavez and had met Dorothy Day, and I was really impressed with him. After the vigil was over, I mentioned this priest in my facebook site and a friend told me that Father Leininger is a pioneer clergy in the social protest movements of the past 40 years. I went on the internet and found that in recent years, Father Leininger has joined in vigils in support of protests in support of janitors at Cisco System, to support WalMart employees, and to fight for immigrant rights. Last May, SIREN (Services, Immigrant Rights, & Education Network), 2nd Annual Fundraiser gave Father Leininger their Advocate Award for his years of support of immigrant rights. After finding this out, I wish I had gotten a chance to talk to Father Leininger more.

If you want to know more about what activists are doing around the country, this website, Everyday Citizen, is a good source of information. Two magazines are also excellent sources. One is the Catholic Worker. Founded in the depths of the Great Depression by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker chronicles the work of a progressive Catholic movement founded by Day and Maurin to help the poor and fight for peace.

In the August-July 2009 Catholic Worker, Jenny Thomas wrote an article about a group of Catholic Workers who went to a Gaza border crossing to deliver $17,000 of medical supplies to a hospital in Gaza. The members of the Catholic worker team, Beth Brockman, Mark Colville, Brenna Cussen, Colin Gilbert, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, and Jenny Thomas, went to the Dheished Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, the Palestinian farmers cut off from any water supply, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Ric Rhetor wrote an article about the New Sanctuary movement and a vigil they held on July 7 outside the Federal Court in New York. It was for Roxroy Salmon and his appeal to stay in the country. RoxRoy is an organizer at Families for Freedom and a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition. Because of minor drug convictions from over 20 years ago, he is facing removal proceedings. The court gave Roxroy an order of deportation, but his lawyer has filed for a deferred action.

Z Magazine is an independent magazine based in Boston. Z Magazine has a radical point of view and chronicles the efforts of activists to make this world a better place.

In the July/August 2009 issue of Z Magazine, there was an article mentioning the closing of Northland Poster Collective after 30 years of creating art, slogans, posters, bumper stickers, t-shirts, poems and quotes for unions, grassroots activists, and social justice movements. The organization was an activist organization and art group, and it provided such slogans for picket lines as “The Labor Movement: The Folks That Brought You The Weekend”, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Cross Picket Lines”, and “Unions: The Anti-Theft Device For Working People”. The troubles that Northland Poster Collective have faced are being faced by all left wing media center.

In the September 2009 issue of Z Magazine, nine activists were arrest in August in Fort McCoy in Tomah, Wisconsin, for protesting U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the continuing U.S. possession of nuclear weapons. These nine activists were also commemorating the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in August 6 and Nagasaki in August 9. Four members of the group were taken to Madison where they faced federal trespass charges.

One of my favorite books is Grace Paley’s book, Just As I Thought. It chronicles her years of activism against war and racism, and her years of teaching. I’ve admired the humorous and down-to-earth perspective that Paley brings to her recollections of protesting the Vietnam War and the various vigils against nuclear weapons. In an interview with Meredith Smith and Karen Kahn, Paley talked about the importance of Americans to use their privileges to fight for social causes.

“But we were just talking about civil disobedience. Some people think it’s an elite act because some of us have privileges of white skin or maybe jobs we won’t lose the minute we are arrested. Well, it’s true that people of color are treated worse in prison than white women. They are. (Of course, the great civil disobedience movements- King, Gandhi- were not exactly white). When white women (or men) use the argument- therefore nobody should do it- I don’t understand them. It seems to me that privilege is obligation, that if it’s easier to go to jail, so to speak, or more possible, then direct actions that may lead to arrest are exactly what we ought to undertake when that is what’s called for.

It’s sort of like having democratic rights and not using them. It’s a totally different subject but people will always come to you when you’re giving out leaflets and say, ‘You wouldn’t be able to do that in Russia.’ So therefore you shouldn’t do it here? Well, of course you have an obligation to push the privileges of democracy, to push and extend them everywhere. And people who can should do so. We also have to be willing to divide up the work without feeling that some folks are being snotty about it or braver. They’re not braver. For instance, when my children were babies, I was a lot more cautious. We much investigate, imagine, press the limits of nonviolent action.”

My favorite book of activism is Howard Zinn’s recollection You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Zinn’s book chronicles his life of activism, from the time he was a teacher at an black women’s school in Spellman College in the 1950s, and his work in the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement. He wrote something that describes the importance of vigils and protests and petition writing in the cause of social change. He wrote:

“Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people’s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that homosexuals are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military interventions despite the brief surge of military madness during the Gulf War.

It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

The bad things that happen are repetitions of bad things that have always happened- war, racism, maltreatment of women, religious and nationalist fanaticism, starvation. The good things that happen are unexpected.

Unexpected, and yet explainable by certain truths which spring at us from time to time, but which we tend to forget: Political power, however formidible, is more fragile than we think. (Note how nervous are those who hold it) Ordinary people can be intimidated for a time, can be fooled for a time, but they have a down-deep common sense, and sooner or later they find a way to challenge the power that oppresses them.

People are not naturally violent or cruel or greedy, although they can be made so. Human beings everywhere want the same things: they are moved by the sight of abandoned children, homeless families, the casualties of war; they long for peace, for friendship and affection across lines of race and nationality.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.”

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

Jasper Escapes the Detention Center
Jasper At A Detention Center
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper’s Day
Jasper Tackles Health Care
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
The Road To Health Care Reform Cartoon
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Jasper Tackles Health Care Reform

Originally published as an August 22, 2009 webcomic for Everyday Citizen

Over the past week or so, I’ve been troubled by the lack of civility in the town hall meetings. It’s sad to see people shouting down other people who are trying to have a civil discussion on the proposals for health care reform. I’ve been shocked to see videos comparing Obama to Hitler. More ominously, some people have even brought guns in Presidential events, brandishing them in public to flaunt their second amendment rights. Sadly, these displays have had an effect on the opinions of people towards Obama’s health care reform proposals, as support for reform has gone down in the polls.

A debate is necessary because the need for reform for health care is so important for our country. Fareed Zakaria wrote a column in the August 17, 2009 Washington Post in which he states:

“Clearly the U.S. health-care system is on an unsustainable path. If current trends continue — and there is no indication that they won’t — health care will consume 40 percent of the national economy by 2050. The problem is that this is a slow and steady decline, producing no crisis. As a result, we seem incapable of grappling with it seriously.

It’s not as if the problems aren’t apparent to everyone, whatever your political persuasion. Costs are rising so fast that every day more than 10,000 Americans lose their insurance coverage. In 1993, 61 percent of small businesses provided health insurance for their employees. Now only 38 percent do. Larger firms face greater health-care costs. Yet, Americans do worse on almost every health measure than most advanced industrial countries, which spend about half as much on health care per person and have proportionately more elderly people. ”

Over the past week, Senator Kent Conrad introduced the idea of a nonprofit health care co-operative as an alternative to the public option plan that has been the centerpiece of President Obama’s health care reform efforts. Senator Kent introduced this plan mainly as a compromise to try to persuade centrist Democrats and Republicans to support health care reform but have serious doubts about a government public insurance option. One must weigh the merits of the co-op plan as compared to the public option plan and see if it meets the goals of helping all Americans receive timely medical care while reducing medical costs so that it doesn’t impose such a burden on the individual and on society. Robert Pear and Gardiner Harris wrote an article in the August 8, 2009 edition of the New York Times examining the merits and possible pitfalls of the co-op idea.

A national co-op idea sounds good on paper. In this plan, the government would offer start up money (estimated at $6 billion) in loans and grants to help doctors, hospitals and other groups to create nonprofit networks to provide health care and coverage. Pear and Harris write that health care experts and economists feel that health care cooperatives could inject competition in some insurance markets around the country. Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota and a former state insurance commissioner, is quoted as saying:

“The market here is uncompetitive. A cooperative could provide an alternative source of insurance and some interesting competition for premium dollars. A co-op could operate at lower costs, in part because it would not need to pay its executives so generously as the local Blue Cross Blue Shield plan.”

In learning more about co-ops from this article, I believe the co-ops idea has merit in certain regions, but the co-op plan isn’t strong enough to solve the national problems of our nation. Pear and Harris notes that co-ops would need time to buy sophisticated information technology and to negotiate contracts with doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. A health co-op in each state would need 25,000 members to be financially viable and at least 500,000 members to negotiate effectively with doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers. Larry J. Zanoni, the executive director of the Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin, said:

“We are a testament to the success of a health care cooperative. But it took us over 30 years to get where we are today.”

A major flaw that I see in the co-op idea is that it may not work in all regions in the country. The New York Times article mentions the case of Iowa in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Iowa passed a law to encourage the development of health care co-ops. One co-op lasted two years before failing, and today, Iowa has no health co-ops.

Lola Wheeler, a blogger in Everyday Citizen, notes that co-ops in her home state of Kansas do not provide universal health coverage for her state. In her recent blog, she notes:

“If cooperatives worked so well in Kansas, why are so many people that I know in Kansas uninsured, going without healthcare or going broke trying to pay their hospital bills? Why are people dying because they have no access to care? Why are we in crisis in the heartland?”

I’ve read 3 strong arguments in favor of the public option. An editorial in the July 20, 2009 edition of The Nation magazine stated:

“Almost every American knows someone who uses Medicare, and the satisfaction with that program is famously high. From a policy perspective, a public option would serve an essential purpose: if it performed with the efficiency and cost control of Medicare, it would impose discipline on private insurers through competition. In other words, it would set a kind of baseline of care by giving people a choice.”

A strong argument was made in the July 1, 2009 edition of The New Republic:

“… the history of American health care is replete with examples of insurers- like all industries- trying to maximize thier profits, often in ways that leave Americans without the financial protection or medical care that they need. In the mid-twentieth century, it was the entrance of for-profit insurers to the market that set off the chain of events that led to the situation we have today- a situation in which people who have pre-existing medical conditions frequently cannot afford to buy coverage on their own. And, in recent decades, it was the transformation of managed care into a for-profit industry that left Americans with medical needs at the mercy of insurers that sometimes made clinical judgments based on profits and loss.

…In this sort of world- the world of American health care as it exists, rather than how it seems in some idyllic conceptions- the case for a public insurance plan is strong. Very strong. Government can decree that its insurance program provide coverage to anybody who seeks it- and that it cover all necessary medical services, without secret gimmickry to wring profits from treatment denials. The government can offer coverage cheaply, by taking advantage of its bargaining power and economies of scale. And, insofar as the goal of reform is to reduce the cost of care in the long run, by attacking the medical habits that encourage excessive or ineffective care, the government can make sure the public plan pays for services in ways that promote the most effective treatments.”

An editorial in the August 19, 2009 San Jose Mercury News strongly advocates the public option plan:

“A public option would utilize the government’s immense negotiating and buying power to drive down rates. Medicare operates with just 8 percent overhead and cares for the vast majority of senior citizens of this country. Why isn’t that the theme of town hall meetings

There’s nothing wrong with establishing co-ops across the nation to help small businesses and individuals get coverage, as the Senate proposes. But they will not substantially affect costs. And without bringing down costs, health care reform- even if it brings coverage to every American- will fail.”

I agree the most with the Mercury editorial. Co-ops in an of themselves are not bad. And the co-op idea shows a commendable thinking outside the box on the part of the Senators trying to craft a difficult health care bill. The example of Iowa in the 1990s, though, shows that co-ops may not be able to cover all citizens in all regions of the nation and compete with well intrenched insurance companies. It seems to me that the public option will do a better job than co-ops of dealing with the problems in our national health care crisis.

Onto more personal news. Some of my Everyday Citizen cartoons have been selected for inclusion in San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum’s Monsters of Webcomics exhibition, and will be featured in the Virtual Gallery along with a wide array of webcomics from around the globe. This historic exhibition will include over 100 artists, making this one of the largest exhibitions in the Cartoon Art Museum’s 24-year history.

Monsters of Webcomics opens to the public from August 8 through December 6 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

You can find the full press release for the exhibition here: http://cartoonart.livejournal.com/29650.html Additional information about exhibitions and events can be found at LiveJournal (http://cartoonart.livejournal.com), Twitter (@cartoonart), on MySpace, and at the museum’s Facebook “Fan” page and “Causes” page.

If you enjoy this cartoon, take a look at these links for more of my political cartoons at Everyday Citizen:

Jasper’s Day
Jasper Protests the War
Jasper and the Economy
Jasper Sings a Protest Song
Jasper Meets a Poet
Jasper At A Detention Center
A Cartoon about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
A Cartoon about My Experience in an Evangelical Church
A Cartoon about Political Debate
A Cartoon On Gay Marriage

Supporting Barack Obama

Election times are here again and Obama is going through the same criticisms that all past Presidents face during an election year. If a Democrat is President, the Republicans accuse him of being a bleeding heart socialist who’s out to destroy the American family and raise taxes unreasonably. If a Republican is President, then Democrats accuse him of being a heartless corporate shill who is in the back pocket of CEOs and is a crazy Christian fanatic. As I’m to the left of the political spectrum, I’m biased towards that direction, but I realize that Democrats and Republican Presidents tend to be more complicated than that. In the 2008 elections, I was originally a Hillary supporter, but I’ve grown to like Obama personally. Obama is not as great as his supporters say he is, but he’s not the worst President in our history, as his conservative critics say he is. He’s a decent president, who has accomplished a lot more than we realize.

I read a historian write that you can’t really judge a President until 20 years after his Presidency is over, and the full implications of his policies are played out. I like Obama, but I have a hard time judging him. I generally like the direction of his policies, although I have disagreements with his immigration policies and other issues. It’s hard for me to really judge him just because the Republican opposition has been so vehement. Past Democratic Presidents could always find common ground with moderate and conservative Republicans on some issues to get things accomplished. There really isn’t any common ground between Obama and the conservative Republicans that make up today’s Congress. I don’t really blame Obama for this. Over the past few years, the Republican Party has gotten more uniformly conservative, and these conservative partisans have done what they can to push out the more moderate Republicans from having any influence. More mainstream conservatives like Senator Bennett and Senator Lugar lost elections to Tea Party conservatives who are much less likely to compromise. So the collaborations between Democrats and Republicans on major legislation, like Senator Lugar working with Senator Kennedy on the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 or Lugar’s collaboration with Senator Nunn on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of 1992, Senator Hatch’s famous collaborations with Senator Kennedy on the The Ryan White Aids Act, The State Children’s Health Insurance Program, The Americans with Disabilities Act, and various other legislation, are now less likely. It made me realize how important moderate Republicans really are to the political process.

Many conservative critics say that Obama is our worst President, but I don’t think Obama is a bad President at all. In my lifetime, the worst Presidents are probably Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Both Presidents had some substantial achievements: Nixon opened up relations with China, pursued detente with the Soviet Union, and had some domestic programs that were surprisingly liberal; while Carter negotiated the Camp David Peace Treaty and had an energy conservation program that was decades ahead of its time. Both men though had deeply flawed presidencies that outweighed their good points.

Nixon overreacted to the Pentagon Papers and his enemies list, his use of the government to break into the psychiatric files of Daniel Ellsberg, the stonewalling of the Watergate investigation, his firing of his cabinet after his reelection, all point to a person who abused power and was a threat to the Constitution.

Carter was a good man who was way over his head when he was President. He had Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House, yet he kept his distance from the Democratic legislators that he needed to pass his programs, and as the writings of Tip O Neil, Walter Mondale and Ted Kennedy attest, Carter often baffled the people in his own party. Since Carter didn’t take the time to build up relations with these legislators, there was no sense of loyalty to Carter’s more moderate policy proposals among the liberals in the party and the liberals turned to Ted Kennedy during the 1980 Democratic primaries. A President with better political skills, like FDR, wouldn’t have let that happen.

I don’t think Obama is on the level of a Franklin Roosevelt or an Abraham Lincoln, but I do think he’s a decent President. In researching this blog, I found two articles that do a good job of articulating Obama’s achievements.

Paul Gastris wrote an article for the Washington Monthly called The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama where he wrote:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.

Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.

That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate for greatness.

And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington. His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.

In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other presidents—arguably the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any president since LBJ.

Tim Dickinson wrote an article for Rolling Stone called The Case For Obama where he wrote:

Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America’s social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration’s $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy’s moonshot and one that’s on track to double America’s capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama’s first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls “an Obama imprint on the court for generations.”

What’s even more impressive about Obama’s accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. “He didn’t have the majority that LBJ had,” says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama’s governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat — and Joe Lieberman.

In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the “Party of No” and its billionaire backers. “Obama is harassed as well as opposed,” says Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. “The crazy Republican right is now unfettered. You’ve got a Senate with no adult leadership. And Obama’s up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the professional right.” Compared to the opposition faced by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds Wilentz, “it’s a wholly different scale.”

Despite such obstacles, Obama has succeeded in forging a progressive legacy that, anchored by health care reform, puts him “into the same conversation with FDR and LBJ,” says Brinkley, “though those two accomplished more.” Goodwin, herself a former Johnson aide, likens the thrust of Obama’s social agenda to LBJ’s historic package of measures known as the Great Society. “What is comparable,” she says, “is the idea of using government to expand social and economic justice. That’s what the health care bill is about. That’s what Obama tried to do with the financial reforms. That’s what he’s doing with education. The Great Society was about using the collective energies of the nation to make life better for more people — and that’s what Obama has tried to do.”

When this elections comes along, I’ll follow the advice that Howard Zinn gave to progressives in 2008. Zinn advised progressives to vote for Obama, but that after the elections, to stay active and work to move the public to issues that are important. Don’t rely on just Obama or Congress for progressive change. We have the responsibility to try to move the country towards fairer immigration laws, climate change legislation, gay marriage, controlling corporate power, combating economic inequality and helping the poor and suffering in our community. Howard Zinn wrote in the May 2009 issue of the Progressive Magazine

I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past…

…This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, “Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view.” Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, “We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us.”

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

A youtube video of Barack Obama’s “The Road We’ve Traveled”

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the death of Bin Laden

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010

A youtube video of Barack Obama announcing the end of the combat mission in Iraq and discussing the future of the U.S. commitment to helping build a stable Iraq

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — legislation to fight pay discrimination and ensure fundamental fairness to American workers

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama talking about stabilizing the auto industry

A youtube video of Barack Obama signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act

A youtube video of Barack Obama nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court

A youtuve video of Barack Obama nominating US Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court

The Raging Grannies

Last Winter, I went to a rally to support a strong health care reform bill that was going through Congress. While I was there, I encountered three oddly dressed older women who were holding signs and singing songs for single-payer health care reform and against the power of insurance companies. This was my first encounter with the Raging Grannies, an activist group that fights for progressive causes like the ecology, economic justice, and civil rights. They use humor and music to protest for just causes.

The Raging Grannies began in 1987 in Victoria, British Columbia when a group of white, middle-class, educated women between the age of 52 and 67 began to protest the visit of US Navy warships and submarines in the harbors of Victoria. Many of these women had experience in activism, but were getting tired of being relegated to making coffee in the peace groups that were then in existence. Due to their marginalization in these other groups, these women decided to form the Raging Grannies to implement their own ideas of social protest, and on February 14, 1987 they staged their first protest. The Raging Grannies sent to Pat Crofton, then Chairman of the Defence Committee, a broken heart to signify his lack of commitment and action on nuclear issues. They sang a few satiric songs under an umbrella full of holes, symbolizing the absurdity of sheltering under a nuclear umbrella. Canadians loved the Raging Grannies, and a movement was started.

From the beginning, the Raging Grannies were committed to nonviolent and creative protest that often interlaces humor and imagination. In their website is a description of their protest philosophy:

From then on, they wore disarming smiles, increasingly colourful clothing as a parody of stereotypes of older women, wrote witty satirical songs, brought a good dose of irreverence and a dynamic imagination for creative protests in their challenges to authorities. Divesting themselves of an “artificial notion of decorum and dignity” (Walker, 1998) they “reversed cultural expectations by empowering themselves in a society which belittles their experience and point of view” (Burns, 1992, p. 21). The Granny figure allowed older women to claim a public space. They often confounded authorities with their unpredictability and imagination. They once rode to the base in a horse-drawn carriage and carried flowers when a nuclear submarine was in. An article found in a granny’s file, which had no date or publication name or author, said: “Officials at the base had to confer for quite a time about the request. . . . Finally the word came that the flowers couldn’t be taken onto the base” (”Grannies Ride in Style”). Their actions often created ambiguity: why would inoffensive flowers delivered in an inoffensive horse-drawn carriage be refused when submarines containing nuclear arms were allowed in? Their unpredictability disturbed complacency, challenged routines, roles, and assumptions.

In the San Jose Raging Grannies website it is written”

1987: The Raging Grannies were founded in Victoria, British Columbia by a group of peace activists who wanted to increase their effectiveness and impact.

Prominent among their stated aims were these:

* to be non-violent in all activities

* to court the press

* to shock with their unladylike antics to get attention for their issues
* to be independent of any other organization

* to use street theater, humor, satire and props to get their message across.

A big part of a Raging Grannies’ protest are the songs that they sing during their protests. The subjects of these songs range from corporate personhood, global warming, single payer health care, to the war in Iraq and Afganistan. They have a Raging Grannies website for their songs, listing over 345 protest songs written by various Raging Grannies from across the nation. Here are some sample Raging Granny songs.

Where Have All the Fishes Gone?

Author: Marcy Matasick, Albuquerque Raging Grannies
Tune: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Where have all the fishes gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the fishes gone?
Long time ago?
Where have all the fishes gone?
Killed by oil spills everyone
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Where have all the oceans gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the oceans gone?
Long time ago?
Where have all the oceans gone?
Turned to toxic crude oil dumps
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Where are all the living things?
Long time passing
Where are all the living things?
Long time ago?
Where are all the living things?
Cooked by global warming
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

How will planet earth survive
This destruction?
How will planet earth survive
Such callous greed?
How will planet earth survive?
Profits matter more than lives
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Single Payer Teachers
Author: Casey Garhart
Tune: Nothing Like a Dame

We’ve got single payer teachers
We’ve got single payer cops
We’ve got single payer heroes
who fight fires without stop
We’ve got fancy cars and houses
and wealth without compare
What ain’t we got?
Single Payer Care!

Canadians get good health care
the British get it too
the French, the Dutch the Germans
just to name a few
But we get health for profit
and there’s an awful smell
What don’t we get?
We don’t get well!

(solo)
insurance companies and pharmaceuticals govern our policies
(solo)
totally oblivious to our own health care . . .realities

(all)
There is nothing like health care!
Nothing in the world!
All we need is Single Payer
to have re-eally good health care
to have re-eally good health care

Rainbow

Author: Catherine Verrall Regina, Sask grans
Tune: Somewhere, Over The Rainbow

In our land there’s a rainbow
People all
Colours lighter and darker
Gay, straight, short & tall
Muslim, Jew & Christian
Buddhist, Hindu, Baha’i
First People’s & Newcomers
Rainbows in our sky
It matters not how families form
For Love is Love and that’s the norm
Faith’s leading
It matters not what words we say
Creator, Allah, God
Life’s spirit, heeding
In our land there’s a rainbow
No room for strife
Each one respected & valued
Each a gift of life

Recently Pam Walton of Pam Walton Productions created a 30 minute documentary called Raging Grannies about the San Francisco Bay Area Raging Grannies chapter. Walton focuses on the individual Grannies to get to know them better and to see what motivates them to be a Raging Granny. Dana Sawchuk, Associate Professor of Sociology of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA wrote of the documentary:

This thought-provoking look at the Raging Grannies is funny, inspiring, and surprisingly moving. Viewers can gain valuable insight on the workings of one of the movement’s most active chapters, observe a sample of unique Granny protests, and are treated to an incredible series of interviews with individual Grannies. I highly recommend this fascinating documentary for activists and for students at all levels in Sociology, Women’s Studies, Community Organizing, and Gerontology.

Since I last saw the Raging Grannies during the health care reform rally, the local Bay Area Raging Grannies have been busy protesting the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, picketed at various Valero gas stations to voice their opposition to the company’s support of Proposition 23, protested a Google proposal to set up a two tier internet access, and protested to save the beavers of Martines, California. There are 60 Raging Grannies gaggles all over the U.S. and Canada, including British Columbia, the San Francisco Bay Area, Tucscon, Arizona, South Florida, Seattle, Washington, Metro Detroit, Michigan, Madison Wisconsin, Ottawa, and Indiana, with many more.

I’m glad that there are women like the Raging Grannies fighting the good fight for our nation. I end this blog with youtube videos of some of the causes that the Raging Grannies have fought for. Thank you Raging Grannies and keep singing.

THE RAGING GRANNIES PROTEST THE BP OIL SPILL

THE RAGING GRANNIES SING FOR GAY MARRIAGE

THE RAGING GRANNIES SING FOR IMMIGRATION RIGHTS

THE RAGING GRANNIES SING FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM

THE RAGING GRANNIES SING AGAINST WAR AND OCCUPATION

THE RAGING GRANNIES FIGHT GOOGLE FOR NET NEUTRALITY

THE RAGING GRANNIES PROTEST PROROGUING THE CANADIAN PARLIAMENT

THE RAGING GRANNIES 20TH ANNIVERSARY

Going to a vigil

Over the years, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been somewhat of an arm chair liberal. I’ve talked a lot with my friends about politics and social change, and I’ve complained a lot about the things that are wrong with our society. Yet I haven’t really volunteered much to try to make any changes in our society. My brother and his wife put me to shame in this sense. Over the years, they have taken part in protests for immigrant rights and to fight the invasion of Iraq, and they are now working with the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports to reduce pollution in the Ports of southern California. Right now they are working on a postcard campaign to persuade local politicians and Congress to support the Clean Trucks program. Attached is the copy of the postcard and here is the website for more information about the Coalition: http://www.cleanandsafeports.org/. I deeply admire them for their activism and willingness to get involved to try to improve their community and their country. I did a cartoon for Everyday Citizen about my cartoon character Jasper taking part in a protest.

Last week I decided to attend my first vigil. It was a vigil on health care reform on September 2, 2009 at the corner of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Winchester Road in San Jose, California. I went with my friend Dave, who officiated my wedding with Lisa 4 years ago, and is a passionate liberal and a former nurse. When I was researching health care reform to try to form an opinion, I would ask people that I knew in the health care field what their opinions were. Dave has definite opinions of the health care debate.

It was a fun vigil. Several people were there for the first time, and I think everyone was invigorated to meet other people who shared the same passion for health care reform. During the vigil, a large group of people lined themselves at the corner of the street and waved signs at passing cars. If the cars approved of the message of universal health care, they would honk their horns. At the same time, the organizer of the event would allow various individuals to go to the microphone and tell of their own individual stories about their experiences being sick and the financial toll that they suffered. As the night encroached, we lighted candles.

I was amazed at how many cars honked their horns in support of health care reform. A lady next to me, who participated in past vigils protesting the war in Iraq, mentioned that there were far more cars honking their horns for health care reforms than honked their horns for peace. The people who were participating in the vigil were very diverse, with many different nationalities, age groups, and an even mix of men and women. Dave and I met unexpectedly met some friends whom we hadn’t seen in over a year.

A highlight for me was in meeting Father Bill Leininger. When I first talked to him, he mentioned that in the past he had marched with Cesar Chavez and had met Dorothy Day, and I was really impressed with him. After the vigil was over, I mentioned this priest in my facebook site and a friend told me that Father Leininger is a pioneer clergy in the social protest movements of the past 40 years. I went on the internet and found that in recent years, Father Leininger has joined in vigils in support of protests in support of janitors at Cisco System, to support WalMart employees, and to fight for immigrant rights. Last May, SIREN (Services, Immigrant Rights, & Education Network), 2nd Annual Fundraiser gave Father Leininger their Advocate Award for his years of support of immigrant rights. After finding this out, I wish I had gotten a chance to talk to Father Leininger more.

If you want to know more about what activists are doing around the country, this website, Crossleft, is a good source of information. The Crossleft bloggers are all activists in various progressive Christian causes and are good sources for progressive action. Two magazines are also excellent sources. One is the Catholic Worker. Founded in the depths of the Great Depression by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker chronicles the work of a progressive Catholic movement founded by Day and Maurin to help the poor and fight for peace.

In the August-July 2009 Catholic Worker, Jenny Thomas wrote an article about a group of Catholic Workers who went to a Gaza border crossing to deliver $17,000 of medical supplies to a hospital in Gaza. The members of the Catholic worker team, Beth Brockman, Mark Colville, Brenna Cussen, Colin Gilbert, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, and Jenny Thomas, went to the Dheished Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, the Palestinian farmers cut off from any water supply, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Ric Rhetor wrote an article about the New Sanctuary movement and a vigil they held on July 7 outside the Federal Court in New York. It was for Roxroy Salmon and his appeal to stay in the country. RoxRoy is an organizer at Families for Freedom and a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition. Because of minor drug convictions from over 20 years ago, he is facing removal proceedings. The court gave Roxroy an order of deportation, but his lawyer has filed for a deferred action.

Z Magazine is an independent magazine based in Boston. Z Magazine has a radical point of view and chronicles the efforts of activists to make this world a better place.

In the July/August 2009 issue of Z Magazine, there was an article mentioning the closing of Northland Poster Collective after 30 years of creating art, slogans, posters, bumper stickers, t-shirts, poems and quotes for unions, grassroots activists, and social justice movements. The organization was an activist organization and art group, and it provided such slogans for picket lines as “The Labor Movement: The Folks That Brought You The Weekend”, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Cross Picket Lines”, and “Unions: The Anti-Theft Device For Working People”. The troubles that Northland Poster Collective have faced are being faced by all left wing media center.

In the September 2009 issue of Z Magazine, nine activists were arrest in August in Fort McCoy in Tomah, Wisconsin, for protesting U.S. wars in Iraq and Afganistan and for the continuing U.S. possession of nuclear weapons. These nine activists were also commemorating the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in August 6 and Nagasaki in August 9. Four members of the group were taken to Madison where they faced federal trespass charges.

One of my favorite books is Grace Paley’s book, Just As I Thought is chronicles her years of activism against war and racism, and for her years of teaching. I’ve admired the humorous and down-to-earth perspective that Paley brings to her recollections of protesting the Vietnam War and the various vigils against nuclear weapons. In an interview with Meredith Smith and Karen Kahn, Paley talked about the importance of Americans to use their privileges to fight for social causes.

“But we were just talking about civil disobedience. Some people think it’s an elite act because some of us have privileges of white skin or maybe jobs we won’t lose the minute we are arrested. Well, it’s true that people of color are treated worse in prison than white women. They are. (Of course, the great civil disobedience movements- King, Gandhi- were not exactly white). When white women (or men) use the argument- therefore nobody should do it- I don’t understand them. It seems to me that privilege is obligation, that if it’s easier to go to jail, so to speak, or more possible, then direct actions that may lead to arrest are exactly what we ought to undertake when that is what’s called for.

It’s sort of like having democratic rights and not using them. It’s a totally different subject but people will always come to you when you’re giving out leaflets and say, ‘You wouldn’t be able to do that in Russia.’ So therefore you shouldn’t do it here? Well, of course you have an obligation to push the privileges of democracy, to push and extend them everywhere. And people who can should do so. We also have to be willing to divide up the work without feeling that some folks are being snotty about it or braver. They’re not braver. For instance, when my children were babies, I was a lot more cautious. We much investigate, imagine, press the limits of nonviolent action.”

My favorite book of activism is Howard Zinn’s recollection You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train. Zinn’s book chronicles his life of activism, from the time he was a teacher at an black women’s school in Spellman College in the 1950s, and his work in the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement. He wrote something that describes the importance of vigils and protests and petition writing in the cause of social change. He wrote:

“Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people’s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that homosexuals are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military interventions despite the brief surge of military madness during the Gulf War.

It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

The bad things that happen are repetitions of bad things that have always happened- war, racism, maltreatment of women, religious and nationalist fanaticism, starvation. The good things that happen are unexpected.

Unexpected, and yet explainable by certain truths which spring at us from time to time, but which we tend to forget: Political power, however formidible, is more fragile than we think. (Note how nervous are those who hold it) Ordinary people can be intimidated for a time, can be fooled for a time, but they have a down-deep common sense, and sooner or later they find a way to challenge the power that oppresses them.

People are not naturally violent or cruel or greedy, although they can be made so. Human beings everywhere want the same things: they are moved by the sight of abandoned children, homeless families, the casualties of war; they long for peace, for friendship and affection across lines of race and nationality.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

Progressives and Their Changing Views of Government

Over the past month, I’ve been noticing a strong anti-government strain to many of the protests in the recent town hall meetings to discuss health care reform. These strong anti-government feelings run very strong among conservatives, while liberals tend to be very strongly pro-government. This is something I’ve always been curious about. How did Progressives and Conservatives come about their positions on the role of government? How has the Left’s view of the role of the federal government evolved over time? I did a cartoon in the August 26, 2009 edition of the Tri-City Voice on the town hall protests.

The argument about the role of the federal government has been around since the beginning of our country, from the debates of the Federalists and Antifederalists over the ratification of the Constitution, to the early debates between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party and Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. The Constitution was created because of great dissatisfaction with the government that was formed from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation was based on the idea that each state would remain sovereign. Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation stated clearly:

“Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Since each state was sovereign, states could ignore with impunity legislation that was passed by the Congress. The federal government had no way of forcing states to pay its fair share of taxes, of giving supplies and troops for battle, they could not control settlers interactions with the Native Americans, it could not enforce foreign treaties it signed on American citizens, it could not settle interstate commerce disputes, it could not settle claims on frontier land, and it couldn’t pay off the debts accrued during the war. Americans were increasingly despairing of the ineffectiveness of the American government under the Articles of Confederation.

In the chapter “Is There a ‘James Madison Problem’” from his book Revolutionary Characters, Gordon Woods notes that James Madison and many of the leaders wanted a constitution based on a stronger federal government because of their own bad experiences in state legislatures in the 1780s. Woods wrote:

“Madison’s experience with the populist politics of the state legislatures was especially important because of his extraordinary influence on the writing of the federal Constitution. But his experience was not unusual; indeed, the framers of the Constitution could not have done what they did if Madison’s experience had not bee widely shared. Many of the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were ready to accept Madison’s Virginia Plan precisely because they shared his deep dislike of the localist and interest-ridden politics of state legislatures. ‘The vile State governments are sources of pollution which will contaminate the American name for ages… Smite them,’ Henry Knox ured Rufus King, sitting in the Philadelphia Convention, ‘smite them, in the name of God and the people.’

Not only Virginia but other states as well had been passing various inflationary paper money laws and other debtor relief legislation that were victimizing creditor minorities. All this experience during the 1780s sparked new thoughts, and Madison began working out for himself a new understanding of American politics, one that involved questioning conventional wisdom concerning majority rule, the proper size for a republic, and the role of factions in society. All these new ideas fed into the Virginia Plan, which became the working model for the Constitutional Convention that met in 1787. Crucial to this plan was the Congress’s power to negative or veto all state legislation that in its opinion violated the articles of the Union.”

Many people who argue for a weak central government have pointed to the 10th Amendment as justification for their views. I did some research on the 10th Amendment and found the book James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Richard Labunski. One particular debate on the wording of the 10th Amendment was of great importance. On page 230, Labunski wrote:

“Tucker of South Carolina introduced a motion that showed how a single word inserted into an important section of the Constitution could have changed the nature of the document and the nation’s history. Tucker wanted to place the word ‘expressly’ in what would become the Tenth Amendment to confirm that the federal government was one of limited powers. His proposed language would have read ‘The powers not expressly delegated by this constitution…’ The Tucker amendment would have greatly diminished congressional authority under the ‘necessary and proper’ clause, which had granted Congress substantial discretion to carry out the responsibilities assigned by the Constitution. It would become a major issue throughout the nation’s history- going to the heart of how a federal system should allocate power between the states and the central government- that has never been settled.

Madison vigorously objected, arguing that ‘it was impossible to confine a government to the exercise of express powers(;) there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the constitution descended to recount every minutiae.’ He told his colleagues that this subject had been raised, discussed, and rejected by the delegates at the Virginia ratifying convention. Tucker’s motion was defeated in the committee of the whole, but he would raise it again in the full House, only to see it defeated on a recorded vote by a margin of 32 to 17.”

During this time, most of the progressive American thinkers of the time, from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, were rebellling from the strong central governments model of the European monarchies. This lead many of them to embrace a relatively anti-government stance. Gordon Wood noted in his book Revolutionary Characters:

“Unlike liberals of the twenty-fist century, Paine and other liberal minded thinkers of the eighteenth century tended to see society as beneficient and government as malevolent. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, legal privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts- indeed all social inequities and deprivations- seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical government. ‘Society,’ wrote Paine in a brilliant summary of this liberal view in the opening paragraph of Common Sense, ‘ is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.’ Society ‘promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections,’ government ‘negatively by restraining our vices.’ Society ‘encourages intercourse;’ government ‘creates distinctions.’ The emerging liberal Jefferson view that the least government was the best was based on such a hopeful belief in the natural harmony of society.”

This view persisted among liberals into the 1850s. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience:

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,- ‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

While the American liberals of the 18th and early 19th century believed in a weak central government, this belief among liberals began to change after the Civil War. Two events brought this about. One of the things that caused a change in liberalism’s view of the government was the fight for equal rights of African Americans. After the Civil War, the Congress, through the leadership of Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner, passed a series of laws to help grant equal citizenship to the newly freed slaves, chief among them the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. When Reconstruction ended and federal troops withdrew from the South, African Americans saw those rights taken away as the local and state governments began to pass segregation and Jim Crow laws and African American leaders began to be harassed by the local Klu Klux Klan. The culmination of the loss of rights was the Supreme Court decision Plessy versus Ferguson. From that time onwards, civil rights activists agitated to force the federal government to intervene in protecting the rights of the black community.

Another thing that forced a reevaluation among some portions of the Left is the growth of corporations and trusts and its expanding control over the lives of all aspects of America. As men like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie worked to create industries that gained untold of profits and gained control of large control of large segments of the American economy, the average American felt less control over their own lives. Rebecca Zurrier’s book Art For the Masses describes the fears of many progressives towards the corporations and trusts:

“Since the late nineteenth century the suspicion had been growing among Americans from all walks of life that the democratic rights of economic and political equality could no longer be attained in a capitalist society.

…the left gained strength between 1871 and 1917 as part of the growing pains accompanying America’s transformation from an agrarian nation of small communities into an urban, industrial society. Growth brought hardship on a scale unimagined before: between one-third and one-half of the population lived in poverty during this period. The ideas of free competition and economic progress that had prevailed in the older society proved inadequate to guarantee the welfare of individuals working for wages in a factory. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism preached only the producer’s right to unlimited growth and the investor’s right to a profit, with no sense of obligation to those who might suffer in the process of making that growth and that profit possible.

…With a popularized version of ‘social Darwinism’ providing moral justification, employers not only paid men less than enough to live on but hired women and children for even lower wages to work twelve- hour days, eighty hour weeks, under conditions that resulted in more than 570,000 industrial accidents each year- and provided no compensation for injury or layoffs. Efforts to form unions met with violent resisteance from employers and ushered in an era of labor strife: nearly 10,000 strikes and lockouts occurred between 1881 and 1890. At the same time, the absence of any sort of government regulation enabled a few men to accumulate huge fortunes and permitted the consolidation of industry into a few powerful trusts. By 1910, 1 percent of the population controlled 47 percent of the nation’s wealth.”

The left during that time developed many different philosophies in response to those economic conditions. Progressive Republicans and Democrats worked within their parties to try to bring about reform to the capitalist system. Socialists and anarchists felt the capitalist system was beyond redeeming and worked to replace it with economic systems that promised to more equitably redistribute the nation’s wealth. The Populists share the goals of shifting the balance of economic power more towards the rural and farming interests. An encapsulation on these various modes of thought could be found in the philosophies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Eugene Debs. David Traxel, in his book Crusader Nation, wrote about the differences in the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson:

“Policy toward the enormous concentration of economic power in the trusts was one of the points of contention in their differing visions of America’s future. Roosevelt believed that this increase in size and power of corporations was inevitable under modern economic conditions; they were here to stay, and the way to control them was through an equally strong central government armed with clear regulatory powers. Wilson, advised by the brilliant Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis, argued that these huge entities should be dismantled, not regulated. Only then would small enterpreneurs and businessmen have a chance to make their own fortunes.”

Eugene Debs was of a different cloth than the progressivism of Roosevelt or Wilson. Disillusioned from the American economic system after a brutal breaking of a Pullman strike in 1894, Debs believed that the state should hold all the means of industry and that industries would be organized as worker co-operatives so that the average workers would be able to benefit from his or her own labor. Bored of the Marxist idealogy and opposed to the warfare of the classes, Debs hoped instead for a nonviolent change from the capitalist system through the ballot box, gaining over 900,000 votes in his run for the Presidency in 1912 and 1920. In an article that Debs wrote on October 15, 1908, he stated his philosophy on the ordering of the economy:

“The process of industrial evolution that has rendered the capitalist a useless functionary has at the same time evolved an organization, co-operative in character, whereby industry may be carried on without friction for the benefit of the whole people instead of for the profit of the individual capitalist. The conduct of industry will be entrusted to men who are technically familiar with all its processes, precisely as it is now entrusted to managers by the stockholders of a corporation; in short, the whole of industry will represent a giant corporation in which all citizens are stockholders, and the state will represent a board of directors acting for the whole people. Details of organization and performance may well be left to the experts to whose direction the matter will be given when the time comes.”

A last strand of the left had a very different opinion on the role of the government is the anarchists, as represented by Emma Goldman. The anarchists, according to wikipedia, believe the state and compulsory government to be unnecessary and harmful and instead wish for the absense of the state. Emma Goldman was a political activist who fought for worker rights and wrote several essays on the anarchist philosophy. In her book Anarchism and Other Essays Goldman wrote:

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

These different strands of leftwing all address the faults of the capitalist system, yet each is distinct. The Progressive philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have morphed into the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. Barack Obama’s proposals bear the influence of Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s progressivism. In these recent health care reform debates, Obama is often unfairly accused of being a socialist. Obama’s actions of the past few months have been to prop up the banking system and reform health care as a means to preserve and buttress the existing free market system. A true socialist, like Eugene Debs, would’ve done away with the existing system and replace it with the society owning the means of production.

It seems to me that the conservatives at last month’s town hall meeting have been tapping into the 18th century progressive spirit of Thomas Paine when they express their displeasure of an encroaching federal government. In light of the last 40 years, of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, of Watergate and the Iran Contra scandals, I can understand some of their scepticism of the government, even if I disagree. Liberals who want the government to alleviate the problems that a for profit system of health care has caused have tapped into the spirit of government activism of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. James Chace wrote in his book 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs- the Election That Changed the Country:

“Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson invented the activist modern presidency. TR’s commitment to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends was not unlike Wilson’s use of executive power to promote free competition that would prevent big business from stifling local economies. Their legacy was the use of centralized power to create greater democracy. For TR, as for Wilson, Hamilton’s strong government had to be united with the ‘one great truth taught by Jefferson- that in America a statesman should trust the people, and should endeavor to secure each man all possible individual liberty, confident that he will use it right.’”

Thoughts on Health Care Reform

Over the past few months, one of President Obama’s greatest legislation goals has been a push for near universal care for all Americans. I generally support universal health care, but I haven’t had a strong opinion on how this country should best achieve this goal, since I’ve yet to get a major health problem that has required me to go through the current medical system. I’ve had several friends who have had bad experiences with their insurance or friends who’ve lost their jobs and have struggled finding health insurance to help them cover their family. I did a cartoon in the July 29, 2009 issue of the Tri-City Voice .

With all this talk, the question first needs to be asked, “Why do we need to reform our health care system?” The June 27, 2009 issue of the Economist was dedicated to the issue of health care reform and it had an editorial that wrote:

Diagnosing what is wrong with America’s health-care system is the easy part. Even though one dollar in every six generated by the world’s richest economy is spent on health- almost twice the average for rich countries- infant mortality, life expectancy and survival-rates for heart attacks are all worse than the OED average. Meanwhile, because health insurance is so expensive, nearly 50m Americans, an obscene number in such a rich place, have none; those that are insured pay through the nose for their cover, and often find it bankruptingly inadequate if they get seriously ill or injured.

The costs of health care hurt America in three other ways. first, since half the population (most children, the very poor, the old, public sector workers) get their health care via the government, the burden on the taxpayer is heavier than it need to be, and is slowly but surely eating up federal and state budgets. Second, private insurance schemes are a huge problem for employers: the cost of health insurance helped bring down GM, and many smaller firms are giving up covering employees. Third, expensive premiums depress workers’ wages.

The July 1, 2009 issue of the New Republic has an editorial that neatly sums up the goals of health care reform:

The only litmus test reform should be whether it achieves its goals: making sure everybody can get timely medical care without experiencing financial ruin; reducing the cost of care overall, so that it no longer imposes such a serious economic burden on individuals and on society as a whole; and improving the quality of care, so that it focuses on prevention and actually makes people better once they are sick. How we achieve these goals is far less important than whether we achieve them.”

There are three models of universal health care being used by the developed nations of the world. Countries like Britain, Canada, and Sweden use a single payer system, which uses taxes for a public system. Countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland obligate its citizens to buy insurance. France has a mixture of a public and a private health care system. I’ll explore the options.

One of the strongest arguments for the single payer health plan is by Pam Pohy, an activist and blogger for Everyday Citizen, a progressive activist site. Pohy quotes the Physicians for a National Health Program in defining a single payer plan and its benefits:

Single-payer is a term used to describe a type of financing system. It refers to one entity acting as administrator, or “payer.” In the case of health care, a single-payer system would be setup such that one entity—a government run organization—would collect all health care fees, and pay out all health care costs. In the current US system, there are literally tens of thousands of different health care organizations—HMOs, billing agencies, etc.

By having so many different payers of health care fees, there is an enormous amount of administrative waste generated in the system. (Just imagine how complex billing must be in a doctor’s office, when each insurance company requires a different form to be completed, has a different billing system, different billing contacts and phone numbers—it’s very confusing.) In a single-payer system, all hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers would bill one entity for their services.

The General Accounting Office (a non-partisan government office) projects an administrative savings of 10 percent through the elimination of private insurance bills and administrative waste, or more than $150 billion. The Congressional Budget Office (another non-partisan government office) projects that single payer would reduce overall health costs by more than $225 billion despite the expansion of comprehensive care to all Americans. Pohy feels that this savings in administrative costs would provide medical care for those currently underserved. Roger Bybee, a Milwaukee based activist, concurs with Pohy’s assertion. He wrote an article titled “Health Reform Via Guaranteed Choice” for the December 2008 Z Magazine where he states:

“Essentially, single-payer plans, operating in nations as diverse as Canada and Taiwan, provide health care to all citizens and permit them free choice of their doctors and hospitals. They also largely eliminate the commanding role of private insurers in the system and the huge administrative costs they impose, enabling the health system to cover every citizen. The single-payer plans are typically funded by a mixture of general tax revenues and payroll taxes.”

Though Obama sees merit in the single payer plan, he is not proposing that for our nation because he feels a change to the single payer plan would be too disruptive to our nation at this time. The June 27, 2009 Economist holds a similar view:

If he were starting from scratch, there would be a strong case (even to a newspaper as economically liberal as this one) for a system based mostly around publicly funded health care. But America is not starting from scratch, and none of the plans in Congress shows an appetite for such a Europen solution. America wants to keep a mostly private system- but one that brings in the uninsured and cuts costs. That will be painful, and require more audacity than Mr. Obama has shown so far.”

Obama’s health care plan seems to model itself after the Swiss and Dutch universal private insurance plans. The June 27 Economist writes:

After decades of failed attempts at reform, a consensus appears to be emerging in America around the principles needed for universal coverage. One likely change means a restructuring of America’s failed health-insurance markets. Firms are today allowed to pick the safest patients and reject the sickest. In future they will have to take all comers. Because this imposes unfair burdens on firms that attract lots of older or sicker people, reform is likely to include government-funded mechanisms for risk pooling or reinsurance.

If done properly, this will in time move America towards the Swiss and Dutch models of universal private insurance. These are not perfect, to be sure. Regina Herzlinger of Havard Business School observes that the Dutch reforms have led to rapid consolidation of insurers and hospitals, fuelling resented price increases. She favours the decentralized Swiss model, which preserves individual choice and competition. Others note that Swiss health-care costs are high by European standards. But they are a third less, as a share of GDP, than America’s, and the country’s excellent health outcomes should be the envy of American reformers.”

The crux of the recent debates in Congress right now have been about the “public option”, a government run insurance entity that people can voluntarily join and that could provide competition to private insurers. Obama has argued that such a public option would insure that all Americans would have access to affordable coverage and that rising health care costs could be contained. Such a plan seeks to preserve existing insurance industry arrangements. Shaleigh Murray wrote an article called “The Crux of the Debate” for the Washington Post National Weekly Edition in which she quotes Obama as saying:

“Just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they’re giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can’t compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what’s the best deal, that defies logic.”

One of the strongest arguments against such a public option is that a government program would underprice private insurers. The New Republic July 1, 2009 editorial takes note of that argument and replies:

“The more intelligent criticisms focus on whether a new public program would set prices too low, starving providers of resources and disrupting care, or take unfair advantage of access to taxpayer money in order to underprice private insurers and drive them out of business. But these are reasons to build in safeguards- safeguards that the leading advocates for a public plan have already embraced. They are not reasons to water down the idea beyond redemption, let alone ditch it altogether.”

Another frequent criticism of government run health care plans is that there are long waiting lists that one must be in to receive care. The Economist feels that having incentives would cut on the waiting lists while also cutting down on costs. In it’s June 27 issue, it writes:

“More competition and transparency would help, but the main goal of any reform plan must be to address the perverse incentives that encourage overconsumption and drive costs up. Medicare has been tinkering with ‘pay for performance’, a promising experiment. Mr. Halvorson insists that by rejigging incentives other health providers can also create their own ‘virtual Kaisers’.

If American reformers doubt the power of incentives, they should visit Sweden. Like other relatively cheap OECD systems, Sweden’s single-payer model has been plagued by long waiting lists- a sign, to American conservatives, of the rationing that goes with socialized medicine. Sweden health officials tried and failed to cut queues by increasing direct funding for hospitals and even issued an edict requiring hospitals to cut queues for elective operations to three monts. Then, last year, the health ministry said it would creat a fund into shich it would pay $128 million a year for local authorities that managed to reduce waiting times to that threshold. Nine months ago, virtually none of the counties passed, but this month the health minister revealed that nearly all had cut their queues to three months or less.”

Because of the opposition of the insurance industry to this public option, Shalaigh Murray reported that a bipartisan group of Senators had been working on an alternative plan, a national network of member-run cooperatives. These cooperatives would create a national structure with state affiliates, and would have the authority to pool their purchasing power. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota is an advocate of the co-op idea and feels it would be “strong, significant competitors to private insurance.”

Working in the library, it’s easy to research magazines about the various health care ideas. I learned long ago to do my own research when it comes to learning about a subject so that I could make up my own mind about things. One of the things that the advocates of a government insurance alternative, a single payer plan or a national co-op system have is a desire to break some of the monopoly of power that large health insurance companies have and give some real choices to the average consumer. Ezra Klein wrote the article “The Ghosts of Battles Past” for the August 3, 2009 Washington Post Weekly in which he wrote:

By last year, only 7 percent of American workers were in ‘traditional’ indemnity health plans, while the rest of us- or at least those of us fortunate enough to have insurance- were swimming in the alphabet soup of HMOs and PPOs and HDHPs. we’re all in networks now. We don’t get our choice of doctor. There’s no appeals process. No out-of-pocket caps. Nothing to stop insurers from rejecting our coverage applications based on preexisting conditions. And if we don’t like our insurer? Tough.

…The Justice Department judges an industry ‘highly concentrated’ if a single company controls more than 42 percent of the market. By that definition, 94 percent of statewide insurance markets are highly concentrated. A recent study by the advocacy organization Health Care for America Now showed that in Indiana, WellPoint controls 60 percent of the insurance market; in Iowa, Wellmark accounts for 71 percent; and in Alabama, Blue Cross/ Blue Shield holds 83 percent. In the past 13 years, there have been more than 400 corporate mergers involving health insurers.

Economic textbooks tell us that concentrated markets reduce the competitive behavior that benefits consumers and lead to outsize profits for the dominant firms. Predictably, health-care premiums shot up more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2007, while the profits of the 10 largest insurers increased 428 percent over the same period.

I think that this is one of the big things that government health care advocates fear about the present system- insurance companies try to maximize their profits sometimes at the expense of Americans with medical needs, creating soaring costs that individuals and businesses can’t afford. From what I understand of the various articles that I’ve read, I’m more convinced than ever that some sort of universal health care is needed for our country. Hopefully in the next month or two, as Obama and the Congress debate the merits and argue their positions, average Americans can understand the necessity for some type of health care reforms and make informed decisions on what kind of reforms they want.