Now that the President and the media are comfortable referring to an ideological divide, let me put the question in non-ideological terms: historically, Americans have wanted to keep government out of their lives. But over the last 200 years, business has become so powerful that it tells us what cereal to eat, that we should smoke, drive instead of using public transportation, where to go on vacation.

Try as I might, I don’t see the advantage. Business is in it for profit. When government tells us to get health or car insurance, it’s not making a dime.

The trouble we all see with government is that it spends our money for things we don’t agree with. That’s where we should be trying to change things.

If you have two friends, and one of them tells you to try his favorite breakfast cereal, and the other is a salesperson for a different breakfast cereal, which one would you trust?

When the country was first coming together, the incipient federal government had to fight to supersede the powers of the individuals colonies, which were in a sense separate “countries” with a common interest, that of getting Great Britain off their backs. It wasn’t easy to get them to unite.

Now we have fifty states, each with their histories, customs, and heroes. A good part of the state legislatures’ time is spent fighting with the Federal Government over who should pay for what. Then there are crucial laws regarding what can or cannot take place “across state lines”.

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, is the clause that authorizes Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.” Much of the U.S. government’s regulatory authority derives from this clause, which specifies that “when Congress is silent, states may act, unless the specific subject requires “uniform national control.”

After the civil war, the 14th Amendment guaranteeing all citizens equal protection under the law complicated the issue of states’ rights and continue to affect a wide range of issue.

With an on-going polemic over which organs of government are empowered to do what, it is not surprising many that citizens see Government with a capital G as something to be resisted.

I wonder what needs to happen for Americans to realize that being told what to think and what to do by business, over which they have no control, is worse.

President Obama had several opportunities during the televised congressional discussions on health care, to correct emphatic assertions by Republicans that we have the best health care in the world. He failed to do so.

True, we may be on the cutting edge in the innovative, highly technical procedures required by world leaders, but according to the statistics provided in the anything-but-liberal Economist’s yearly Pocket World in Figures, the United States is in 41st place among the almost two hundred countries of the world when it comes to life expectancy (two places behind Cuba, by the way).

When it comes to infant mortality, we are not among the lowest twenty-five, and we are in third place when it comes to obesity among men, eighth place among women. We are not among the eighteen countries that have the lowest number of population per doctor (Cuba comes in second, and among the industrialized countries on the list are Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Israel, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands and Austria.) Obviously, some countries who have more doctors per head may not provide optimum care, such as Russia or Greece, but the fact that the United States spends roughly one and a half times as much as the members of the European Union should be broadcast more widely than it is.

Obama’s failure to rebut affirmations that we have the best health care in the world is not only a failure of honesty. It strengthens the position of those who believe that the main problem with our health care system is its cost. Low numbers in favor of major reform include those who consider single payer to be the only solution, and those who, when false affirmations are aloud to stand, say: “If our health care is ‘the best’, we could allow ourselves to spend less without putting the health of the population in danger, right?

One of Fareed Zakaria’s guest’s on GPS today was Paul Volker, former head of the Federal Reserve. His main reason for worrying about the abysmal state of American governance is that “there’s nobody else out there who could lead the world.” Most people will agree with that, but few stop to consider whether the world needs a leader.

As if to underline the fact that it’s time for world go-vernance instead of a world leader, Zakaria’s next two guests, Richard N Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, had a lengthy discussion over whether the U.S. should seriously consider either taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities, or somehow effectuating regime change.

Our leaders and those who comment on their doings have ceased to live in the real world. These two highly paid intellectuals were also considering whether or not to “let Israel do it”, underlining the fact that this tiny country that deprives the Palestinians of a homeland, maintains a military far out of proportion to either its size or its potential threats, thanks to our help, and is eager to “reciprocate”.

The question is, does anyone doubt that a world government would consider Iran a threat to the world community?

While our diplomats and military mull over the best way to “keep America safe”, the leaders of other countries are working together to try to keep the planet from either overheating or blowing up. While we discuss our “responsibility” to lead, the rest of the world would be happy if we could just cooperate.

Whether or not the Northeast gets the monumental snowfall forecast,
to match the Tea Party, we need a Snowball effect: all those who are wringing their hands, or perhaps acting, need to immediately go to Lawrence Lessig’s websight: www.changecongressfirst.org to sign a petition for a Constitutional Convention.

You can also join the conversation about the pros and cons on this site.

DO IT!

This morning President Obama met with Democratic senators and representatives to discuss the challenges he and they face, after meeting with a similar group of Republicans a few days ago.

The atmosphere, of course was different. But one thing struck me that probably went unnoticed by most, even if it elicited audible recognition by the audience: President Obama pointed out that China is currently way ahead of the U.S. in the area of renewable energy. And he added: “But China is not a democracy.”

Together with the week-old Supreme Court decision that enhances the status of corporations as persons, leaving the door wide open for them to openly purchase elections, this is no small detail: The President failed to mention that China weathered the global economic crisis better than anyone. The reason: the Communist leadership – a handful of people – decided to create a stimulus package equal to the one Americans got after a lot of bickering and recrimination.

I’m not advocating for a totalitarian system, I’m simply pointing out that we have a sort of unofficial totali-tarian system run by big money, which makes is much more difficult for our elected representatives to behave as the founders intended them to. I’m pleased to not that calls for a constitutional convention are appearing here and there, and even if you are persuaded that principles enunciated two hundred years ago are still valid – as one comment to my latest blog Kos affirmed – the founders expressed many fears that their opus would be a Pandora’s Box, leading to situations they could not predict. So did Teddy Roosevelt. President Eisenhower, in his famous last address, was more specific and hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t quote his warning about the military-industrial complex.
But – as the President would say – make no mistake: democracy demands a level of ethical development (see the work of Lawrence Kohlberg), that a system based on near-total individual freedom does not foster.

Martin Jacques much talked about book entitled When China Rules the World emphasizes the revived Confucian tradition of virtue as the principal guiding China’s totalitarian rulers. In Shock Doctrine, republished on its tenth anniversary, Naomi Klein reveals the little known history of (among others, Russia’s transition to capitalism under Yeltsin.

All this should alert even the most devoted democrat, that labels are not what matter most, but actions.

The February 1st issue of The New Yorker has a chilling article by Ben McGrath describing his encounters with members of the Tea Party, the right-wing populist movement which used the organizing tools of the left to initiate the campaign against Obama’s health care plan, which represents big government at its worst, overlooking the fact that most seniors are extremely happy with the government-run Medicare program.
The teapartiers, educated, like all Americans, to believe that ideo-logy is bad, see only the long arm of government depriving them of the most precious American value: freedom. According to Daniel Bell and others, populism is ‘pathological’, flourishing only when orthodox democratic politics does not. In most countries, when democracy fails to deliver, there is likely to be a call for more government, or socialism. What makes Ame-rica different is the fact that our educational system labels ideology as undesirable, indoctrinating us as surely as any totalitarian country away from a logical choice between the right, which favors the few, and the left, which favors the many.
The values which the Tea Party wants Americans to get back to are known as 9.12, for the day after America was attacked: “I believe in God and He is the center of my life. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.”
Compare this with the fact that God is the center of a Muslim’s life, and that one of the five pillars of Islam is charity, which must be performed every day, vis a vis any person one encounters. In the name of God, Islam differs from the Tea Partiers, who also invoke God, but accuse those who receive charity through the government of being slackers.
In its January 30th issue The Economist describes Swedish efforts to bring toddlers of Muslim immigrants into nursery schools, and their mothers into Swedish language classes with a view to becoming bread-winners. You won’t find this information on your friendly TV station, but you will learn there that France is considering a partial ban on the wearing of the Burqa in public. (The first represents a ‘soft’ approach, in line with Scandinavia’s near uninterrupted rule by Social Democrats; the second, in a country that’s slightly schizophrenic about its social democracy, reflects the French penchant for political strife.) But both are in some way about compromise that social democracy calls for.
When the president, in his well-publicized belief in compromise, reassures his opponents that he is not an ideologue, that doesn’t only mean that he is probably not going to spread the wealth. It means he has, at least for the present, given in to a corporate system that all the more easily passes for government that our citizens have been indoctrinated against ideology.

I seem to recall that a popular definition of an idiot is someone who continues to do the same wrong thing over and over and is surprised to get the same result. I’m hoping that President Obama’s superior intelligence is secretly at work toward the change he promised.

We’re being told this morning that the theme of tonight’s State of the Union speech will be bi-partisanship: that has to mean more cooperation from Republicans. Does the president really believe the Republicans are suddenly going to play nice (whether or not they captured the Massachusetts Senate seat)?

More worringly, if President Obama sincerely believes that he can obtain the cooperation of his adversaries, he is admitting that Democrats and Republicans are more alike than most Obama voters would like to think. It’s obviously good for a country to be led by a bunch of people who basically agree. But if that bunch represents a minority of the whole, what we have is not democracy but oligarchy.

Moving on momentarily to Haiti, for all their bad reputa-tion, the Haitian people have been admirably patient after an earthquake all but destroyed their country. Are they likely to renew their confidence in a government that only exists because the United States wants it to? (Jean Ber-trand Aristide, whom the people voted in twice, was twice deposed by American presidents for opposing the kind of economic system that left Haiti without hospitals – or even Tylenol – when the earthquake struck.)

Now let’s move on to Haiti’s neighbor, Cuba. Food is still rationed after fifty years of trying to achieve equality in the face of a powerful neighbor who disapproves. But Cuba takes care of its people when cyclones hit, trains Haitian doctors free of charge and sends 400 Cuban doctors to work permanently in Haiti. I wonder how many Haitians wish they were on the other side of the Wayward Passage that separates them from Cuba.

Returning now to the United States, the “change” Obama promised when we enthusiastically elected him, can only come about if he denounces the distortion of the term “bi-partisan”: originally the term meant that opposing camps are both able to support a given legislation. In Washington, Republicans only support legislation once its Democratic flavor has been neutralized.

Sooner or later, an American president who cares about the American people is going to have to bite the bullet and encourage the creation of a Social Democratic alternative to “bi-partisan” oligarchy.

And some day, if we let them, the Haitian people will stand up for the kind of government they want.

Dear Readers,
I’m not copping out, plenty to write about, but I think this should be widely disseminated, so I’m doing my bit. I received this from Seniors United 4 Victory:

P R E A M B L E

“We the Corporations of a New Global Imperialism,
in Order to form a more perfect Profit,
establish Dominion over all lands of the Earth,
insure international Wealth superiority,
provide for our common defense, promote Corporate Welfare,
and secure the Blessings of Wealth to ourselves
and our limited Posterity, do ordain and establish this Plan
for subjugation of the citizens of the United States of America.”
—— United States Supreme Court, 21 January 2010

===========================================

Corporations are legal fictions, not living breathing human beings.
.
Corporations have no life, no soul.
.
Corporations have no rights under the United States Constitution.
.
Corporations are ownable by international cartels.
.
Corporations are NOT citizens of any Nation.
.
Corporations cannot vote in any election in the United States.
.
Corporations cannot be elected to any Office anywhere in America.
.
Corporations have no right to influence any Election, anywhere, ever.

============================================
.
On 21 January 201o, the first shot of another Battle in the 2nd
American Revolution was fired. Five of nine inJustices who have never
been elected to any Office, who were placed on the US Supreme Court by World Order NeoConservatives, declared themselves Champions of
MultiNational Corporate Fascism, and Enemies of the American People.
.
May God have Mercy upon their worthless, traitorous souls.
.
============================================
‘Free at Last,’ Business Says as Court Opens Campaign Spending –High
court’s 5-4 ruling struck down restrictions on independent political
spending by corporations, unions 21 Jan 2010 Business groups
celebrated the potential for greater political influence as labor
unions and shareholder activists began looking for ways to counter a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited corporate campaign
spending. “Free at last, free at last!” said Cleta Mitchell, a
campaign lawyer at Foley & Lardner LLP in Washington who represents
companies and trade groups before the Federal Election Commission.
“Business has been gagged for decades.”

US Supreme Court lifts campaign finance limits 22 Jan 2010 In a
sweeping decision that will change the face of the 2010 US mid-term
election and beyond, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision on
Thursday to lift limits on corporate spending in campaigns. The long-
awaited decision is expected to open the floodgates on corporate money in elections, reversing restrictions that have been in place since the 1940s that prohibited corporations from buying campaign ads from their own treasuries. It also reversed rules that prevented corporations from explicitly supporting candidates in campaign ads.

U.S. government for sale –With no limits on campaign financing,
corporations will take over the government By Keith Olbermann 21 Jan
2010 And be prepared, then, for the bank reforms that President Obama has just this day vowed to enable, to be rolled back by his successor purchased by the banks, with the money President [sic] Bush gave them his successor, presumably President Palin, because if you need a friendly face of fascism, you might as well get one that can wink, and if you need a tool of whichever large industries buy her first, you might as well get somebody who lives up to that word “tool.” …The Internet? …Kiss net neutrality goodbye. Kiss whatever right to privacy you think you currently have, goodbye. And anyway, what are you going to complain about, if you don’t even know it happened? In the new world unveiled this morning by John Roberts, who stops Rupert Murdoch from buying the Associated Press?

“We the corporations” (Move to Amend) 21 Jan 2010 On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. We Move to Amend. We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution. [We need to move to amend, and *a whole lot more.*]

To subscribe to Citizens for Legitimate Government: http://www.legitgov.org/#subscribe_clg

Today’s “crucial” election in Massachusetts allows me to catch up with Sunday’s sensation on a Tuesday.

The Sunday morning talk shows were all about the presidential campaign tell-all, Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.   The revelation that Barack Obama was in fact the establishment’s candidate, Hillary being encumbered with a past and a husband with a past, should be a relief to those of us who wondered why things seem to be going so wrong now that the candidate who promised Progressive change is in office.  It frees us to think about the institutional changes that are necessary for creating a new establishment.

The other nugget, was the “revelation” of just how in unqualified Sarah Palin was to be Vice-President.  Juicy bits about her not knowing 20th century history – let alone anything about the Constitution – there again, could make Progressives feel good. (As Tom Hartmann said yesterday on his radio show, broadcast on Free Speech TV, their crazies are worse than our crazies.)  But alas, alack, Sarah Palin’s admirers are the same people who will likely vote for the pretty boy Republican who apparently ran a workmanlike campaign, to fill Edward Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat today.

You just have to take one look at the candidate’s pictures to see that Rahm Emanuel (revealed in the above book as declaring that Progressives don’t matter, that they have nowhere to go) blew it.  People who shriek and swoon over Sarah  Palin, and who’ve already elected a Republican governor (Mitt Romney), are more likely to vote for a handsome fellow than a female who is the opposite of Sarah Palin.  Martha Coakley is an Attorney General, an office that seems eminently suited to her appearance – or which is perhaps reflected in her appearance. Brown also has going for him that he is a state senator, and thus more suited to elective office.

Appropriately, the current issue of The Atlantic , marking Obama’s first year in office, is devoted to soothing the American people and convincing that a) China is not going to rule the world, and b) our two hundred year old system is the best we can hope for, even if it prevents super-intelligent, charismatic leaders like Obama from ever bringing about meaningful change.

That must be why the beltway money, in the likely event of a Democratic loss in the Massachusetts race, is on Obama bullying the House into accepting as is the Senate health bill, rather than risking losing it through negotiations.

While assuring Haitians that they will not be abandoned, President Obama has named former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton as special envoys to the devastated island. Both of them in turn removed the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who sits in exile in South Africa and would once again like to come home, where most Haitians want him to be.

Try to hear Democracy Now this evening if you missed it in the morning or at noon, for an excellent primer on why Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere.  It is provided by the African-American lawyer, writer and political activist Randall Robinson. His latest book is An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President, Perseus Books Group, 2007. See his unusual bio on Wikipedia.

When you see the pictures of Haiti’s lush countryside on television, you wonder why the country can’t feed itself.  Then you follow a few links on-line and learn that even though it has been an independent country for most of the last century, the United States in effect has dominated its economy, in particular destroying its agriculture and forcing Haiti to buy U.S. food.

When you are told by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta,sent to practice a little medicine as he tells the story of Haiti’s disaster, you wonder why “there are no doctors, the hospitals lack even the basic medications such as Tylenol.” The sight of a hospital in Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince, looks strikingly similar to hospitals in Gaza and other destitute places around the world that Americans are given to contemplate in passing on the occasion of some tragedy.

The Dominican Republic, which shares a Caribbean Island with Haiti, has sent no aid.  There is a history of discrimination on the part of its “lighter” inhabitants.

From a little more than 50 miles across the Windward Passage of the Caribbean, Cuba has trained 500 doctors who are working in rural areas of Haiti, and is training 500 more, with government scholarships.

Venezuela sent the first plane the day after the quake.  It carried 19 doctors, 10 firemen and rescue specialists, 17 civil protection experts and three members of the Simon Bolivar International Brigade that is visiting affected areas and evaluating damages.

P.S. Philadelphia 76ers Haitian-born player Samuel Dalembert is raising funds for relief efforts in Haiti. He is the founder of the Samuel Dalembert Foundation, which has teamed with UNICEF, the Red Cross and Feed the Children to support humanitarian aid to his home country, and has pledged to match the total of donations collected at tonight’s game.

Here is a link to a Haitian organization trying to build democracy in Haiti

http://www.fonkoze.org/.  You can donate on their website.

How many countries will have to suffer natural disasters before the world realizes that it needs a permanent corps of relief doctors, workers, and equipment?

The scramble to appear ready and willing is unseemly.  rescue operations cannot wait for governments to make phone calls, decide who will do what, fuel up planes, detour ships, all the while putting our messages of pain and support.

Just today, a member of the American negotiating team at the December Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen stated that it was the fault of the ALBA nations of Latin America, citing Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia, the four left most nations of the alliance) if the negotia-tions had failed.  He said they weren’t interested in saving the planet, but only in “equalizing wealth around the world”, or words to that effect.

Coming amidst the cries of the Haitian victims, that vitu-perative declaration was particularly cynical.  The alternative news sites gave full play to U.S. involvement in Haiti’s disastrous 20th century history, which continues to this day, and has prevented the island nation from acquiring an infrastructure that serves the people rather than the multi-national corporations.  Shantytowns built on deforested hillsides were wiped out while concrete bypasses suitable for the vehicles of the elite could be seen still standing on the newsreels.

Nature and morality agree on the need to share the wealth  and spare the planet.  The rulers think they can get by with piecemeal measures that illustrate Al Qaeda’s rants.

Reverse Whackamole

Finally, a talk show host, Chris Matthews, is asking his guests whether Al Qaeda has become a diffuse threat.  The thought that comes to mind is that we are playing reverse whackamole with Muslim extremists.  Instead of us beating them down in one place, only to have them pop up somewhere else, what is happening is that they are not getting beaten down, and are luring us ever onward. We send more troops to a place with a heavy Al Qaeda or Taliban presence, and while we’re fighting there, cousins beckon us from another place.  This is not the usual whackamole, in which similar situations that each other.  We are faced with an ever-expanding situation which is controlled by the other side.

Right now, we’re officially involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, semi-officially involved in Pakistan, and half-involved in Somalia.  But we’re being lured into Yemen, the Palestinian problem is far from resolved, and the other “stans”, where pipe lines are involved, are in turmoil.  The struggle with Islam confronts Russia, China and India on their home turfs, while the United States worries about border security.

We’re used to thinking in terms of the situation that existed during the Cold War  The two halves of Europe, one under Russian control, the other being at risk, and two small countries in Asia (Korea and Vietnam) that were described as dominos, the loss of one imperiling an endless series of others. Now we’re playing a game with no boundaries, as countries unravel across the globe.

The lure of terror to fix problems as disparate as hunger and control of oil touches not just the Asiatic stans but the Muslim countries of Africa.  Latin America is about the only part of the world where Islam is not an issue, yet we prolong the Cold War there with Venezuela and Cuba.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be drawn first into one crisis then another, we should think about how we could remain secure in a world divided by two conflicting views of life: One believes that God wants a modicum of equality between men, and between humans and the environment.  The other believes that men should compete for wealth locally and for the world’s resources across the globe.  Although presented as an ideological problem, it involves two dif-ferent views of ethics.

As presented by Alastair Crooke in Resistance: The Essence of the Islamic Struggle , the two ways of viewing the world can be traced to the Enlightenment. According to a Shi’a cleric quoted at length by Crooke, the Protestant reformation involved nothing less than a deliberate move away from communally-oriented Catholicism, toward a personal relationship with God that encouraged indivi-dualism and the desire for goods, to be met by the nascent industrial revolution.

The outstanding feature of Islam is that it is about community, known as the umma . It abhors a society based on ever more individual satisfactions, to the detriment of community. The rift began before the wars for oil, but military actions undertaken in pursuit of the raw material that keeps our over-consuming societies running could only exacerbate that cultural conflict.

As the most powerful country in the world throws ever more money, arms and men at the problem, groups of determined individuals use technology to thwart our materialist aims.

The thousands of Muslims across the globe who do not appreciate our way of life from an ethical standpoint are not likely to turn on their brethren who take up arms to oppose its encroachments. We could end up having to dispatch troops or special ops to every Muslim-majority country, for as long as the crusades. Bin Laden’s scheme to weaken us by forcing us to fight first in Iraq then in Afghanistan, has taken on a life of its own: we are being sucked dry by small groups of determined men.

Aside from the need for oil, we consider it barbaric that Muslim women are forced to wear the veil or the hijab, or worse, the burka. We do not send our sons to die for them, but the existence of customs so at odds with modernity give us what can be taken as a moral cover. Our TV hosts do not bring on their shows liberated, secular Western women who agree that even in a modern society, it is repugnant to see sex turned into a vulgar commercial display. Muslim men may be allowed to have several wives, but too many Western women, perhaps, have accepted as proof of their liberation the transformation of lascivious belly dancing dancing into raunchy clowning.

Alas, husbands of women who enjoy watching other women in vulgar representations of their sexuality are increasingly joining right-wing militias for the purpose of pursuing the few American Muslims who support the worldwide struggle for community in which all women would be treated as objects in a different way, one which, while not creating commercial wealth, enshrines far and wide what we call machismo.

If the pundits would only bring the discussion down from military and intelligence heights, we could explore the issues that drive educated men from good families to want to destroy us.