IRAQ, MYTH VS. REALITY

    Dubya’s tired rhetoric this week about the war in Iraq is simply a do over of past speeches and talking points.  Put simply the goals are to – 1) secure Iraq against the insurgents – rejectionists (Sunni Arabs), Saddamists (Bath party members), or terrorists (al Quaeda);  2) get the economy up and running by rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by years of neglect under Saddam and US bombing;  and 3) achieve democratic regime change via the new constitution and the election of a constituent assembly.
    Unfortunately, the news out of Iraq in the last two days belies the administration’s version of reality – 10 US soldiers killed, 11 Iraqi soldiers killed and kidnapping of foreign civilian peace workers.  Yep, mission accomplished.  End the occupation – bring the troops home NOW.  Enough of this stupidity! 

HEALTH CARE IN THE USA & CANADA

    This term RAD is completing a course at PSU on the politics of health care.  I asked my Canadian connection (WM) about his take on Canada's system.  He said... 
    "In theory I am very happy with socialized medicine. However, I have been fortunate to have good health and have hardly ever used the system. So, I can help you only by what my friends have experienced. I just hope the thing is there when I do need it."
    "You can choose your own doctor and see him by appointment in his office. However, what many people do is go to emergency at the hospital, wait their turn and take who they get and then complain about waiting. Your doc refers you to specialists."
    "Yes, there are waiting lists and I don't think all sorts of experimental treatments are approved. For example, a cancer patient from here went on her own to some guy in Texas who was trying some weird experiments.Peach pits or something. Some from here choose to go to the Mayo Clinic. For some things that aren't covered here or available here, the provincial government helps pay for out of province stuff."
    "My impression is that the system works on a sort of triage approach-- those who need it first, get it first. Those who don't, wait in line."
    "Two examples of how I personally know the system worked: a good friend had disk problems and a  ruptured Achilles tendon. Both times he had immediate attention and surgery in a day or two in Regina. No bills." 
    "Another friend had a young son who suffered from cancer (it eventually killed him) on and off from about age five to ten. Every time he saw specialists in Regina at a cancer clinic for some things and then in Calgary for some other more advanced things-- bone marrow, etc. The Calgary specialist informed the parents that they could go to the Mayo Clinic if they wished, but that Calgary could do everything Mayo could. No bills..."
    "Is it perfect? Probably not. How much did you pay? Want US hospital bills? I often point out to people, how much did you owe when your child was born here? Nothing. How much would you pay in Crosby, ND, thirty miles from here? Ten thousand if there is the slightest birth complication? More?"
    By contrast one of my PSU students described health care delivery in a dental clinic in this way:
    "Quality and extent of treatment will be compromised in a National Health Care system.  What is paid out by the government is so low that private offices would have to double book the normal amount of patients needed to recoup the low cost.  Less time is spent with the patient in any form of treatment."
    "Treatments would also be withheld or not even mentioned because insurance would not pay for it or professional providers think that the patient can't afford it.  A National Health Care system would not be able to afford access to expensive leading edge technology."
    "I worked in a dental office once that accepted OHP [Oregon Health Plan, i.e. Medicaid].  We had to double book, because of low fees, some patients didn't even show up for appointments.  Crowns were not made with precious metals that are used in our FFS [fee for service] patients.  Not same type of composite fillings.  Less time was spent with the patient.  Quality of the work was definitely compromised."
    "Ideally, we want access to all with good quality and affordability.  It cannot in anyway go hand in hand.  Health care is a business and unfortunately it is about making money!"
    RAD:  First, my PSU student's comments shows the power of the mythology about so-called 'socialized medicine'.  For the record, Canada DOES NOT HAVE 'socialized' medicine - it has a national health insurance system administered province by province but partially reimbursed by the national government, at a 50% share.
    Secondly, the unethical treatment under OHP in Oregon is probably a violation of the law and in a system which combines both private and public insurance.  If there was only one funding source, a single payer system - doctors could not play this duplicitous game and quality care would be fully funded.
    OHP has been the victim of our miserly state legislature, the machinations of the anti-government crowd from Grover Norquist to Bill Sizemore and the voter's stupidity in allowing state funding to wither on the vine since the '90s!  The funding for OHP has shrunk every year since its passage in '91.  But if one has an HMO, not FFS, your private company also will not pay 100% of the bill to say nothing about higher and higher co-pays and deductibles. 
    Now you make the choice:  Canada or the USA!   

NO FREE LUNCH

    I was surfing the net tonight and happened upon C-SPAN’s coverage of Minority Leader Nanci Pelosi (Dem. CA) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  In response to a question from one of Harvard’s best and brightest women students about using market solutions to address social problem, Pelosi gave a non-answer answer to the question by pandering to her ‘good works’ and then suggesting they talk later.  
    The young woman is clearly a well-meaning person who has come to believe the market place can be used to solve social problems.  This is a myth perpetuated by both Rs and Ds. If poverty, racism, sexism, ageism et al. were amenable to market solutions – such problems wouldn’t exist today.  After all we’ve had conservatives in power in this nation since LBJ left the West Wing in ‘68.  
    Richard Nixon was a conservative who’s Bush II like agenda was derailed by the Vietnam War and then Watergate.  But let’s be honest, he wasn’t alone.  For all their rhetoric about compassion and decency – Gerry Ford (our national nightmare is over), Jimmy Carter (the malaise president), George Bush (a thousand points of light) and Bill Clinton (who ended welfare), each governed as an economic conservative.
    Their political rhetoric may have sounded different, but their governance was reasonably similar.  After all – why do you think Alan Greenspan could last so long at the FED?  As African-American used to say about Jimmy Carter, be careful of candidates who sing your hymns.  One can practice conservative or liberal politics on the symbolic level, but deliver the goodies to the same old corporate crowd in Gucci Gulch.
    Now what’s the record of moderate conservatism under Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush I and Clinton and radical conservatism under Reagan and Bush? The middle class has been eviscerated.  Those lunch bucket Ds who voted for Reagan in ’80 have seen their lives and lifestyles downsized, especially in the rust belt states of the upper Midwest.  The 30,000 GM employees are just the latest casualties in the war against the working class.  
    As the once economically secure middle class becomes increasingly impoverished by losing their health benefits, their pensions, their job security – they are joining the ranks of the working poor or those we euphemistically say are facing housing, food and health care insecurity.  They are becoming what Karl Marx termed the lumpen proletariat or what today we’d term the Wal-Martized working poor.  
    The fact is that 35 years of conservative governance has made Wall Street fat off the fruits of globalization but Main Street a ghost town of boutique and antique stores.  It’s like the scenes from the movie “Back to the Future”.  Small towns have lost their businesses to strip malls and the inner city to the big malls in the burbs.  The arrival of the big box stores puts another nail in the coffin of small and big cities, suburbs and exurbs, rural and urban USA.    
    The fact is that the market place has no capacity to provide health care to the working poor, decent housing to those who’s incomes are below 50% of MFI, quality schools to inner city youth or rural poor, or family wage jobs in an economy dominated more and more by service sector jobs.  And the dot.com bust of the ‘90s shows that nobody is safe from being downsized no matter what their skill set, education or experience!  
    The only reason areas like the Portland metro area are attractive and growing is because of the public infrastructure that has been built at federal taxpayer expense over the last 40 years.  Examples include the transit mall, light rail, urban renewal (Civic Center, PSU’s campus, the Schnitzer, the Pearl and now South Waterfront).  Minus huge public subsidies by the federal and state government – none of this would be happening!  The lesson here is that the market requires public investments to make it work. It always has!   
    But at the end of the day, such public/private partnerships don’t benefit all residents of Portland or Oregon equally.  Ask folks in Coos Bay, Astoria, Redmond, Roseburg.  The “other” Oregon proves that without governmental incentives – subsidies, tax breaks (credits, deductions etc.) – Oregon as a natural resource rich state is simply another colony in the lower 48.  Without the deep pockets of federal and state tax dollars – public goods waste away.  
    We can build affordable housing in Oregon on a 1 to 13 match of state money to other money.  But the ‘other’ money is a blend of federal tax dollars and private capital underwritten by tax credits and deductions.  Only by a heavy public subsidy will private money come into the picture, one way or the other.  And then it’s not enough!  At the current rate it will be forty years before we can meet the current need!  So much for the market.   
    But thanks to the work of a generation of Oregon leaders from Tom McCall to Mark Hatfield, from Les AuCoin to Neil Goldschmidt, from Vic Atiyeh to Barbara Roberts Oregon has been able “to fly with her own wings”, sort of.  But this all came crashing down in Oregon with the passage of Measure 5, 46 and 50 in the ‘90s and continues to spiral out of control under the politics of lowered expectations.
    Current leaders on both sides of the political fence in Salem have answered the call to dealing with Oregon’s economic doldrums by passing a permanent ‘kicker’ law, relying more and more on gambling as a source of revenue and fawning over corporate giants like Intel and Nike by giving them huge tax breaks.  And when a local mayor dares to challenge Phil Knight’s ‘rule’ – the establishment rallies to the bullies’ side.  So much for the courage to be! 
    As long a Democrats like Nanci Pelosi and Ted Kulongoski pimp for corporate America and Oregon – we will see our economy increasingly become one where “all are equal, but some are more equal than others.”  In that they are no different than Dubya and Newt.  Their mood music on issues like gay rights, affirmative action, choice may sound different from their neo-con counterparts, but they govern of, by and for the corporate elites who after all bankroll their campaigns!  
    We need to end the fraudulent claims by neo-cons of the right, left and center that the market is the greatest force for social amelioration and justice.  The market in the USA has never been a neutral force, it’s always benefited those with access and big bucks while using the public’s money to subsidize their private dreams under the aura of the public good.  Isn’t that the lesson of the scandal du jour in DC these days out of Tom Delay’s stable of former staff and allies?   Remember Tea Pot Dome? 
    If there were a market solution to health care, to affordable housing, to quality schools, to protecting the environment – the ‘80s should have taken us to the Promised Land.  Instead, it has taken us to the brink of two societies – one rich and one poor, one white and one Black, one empowered and one alienated.  
    Katrina showed us the soft underbelly of the neo-con lie become a nightmare, that we can have something for nothing.  PT Barnum was right, in America there is a sucker born every minute.  We’ve got to quit being suckered by the rhetoric of so-called realism be it from Newt Gingrich or Nanci Pelosi.  Otherwise the lesser among us will continue to suffer the consequences of that soft bigotry of lowered expectations. And those of us in the middle class will become increasingly marginalized.  
    RAD’s answer – lets use the power of the market which  generates huge revenue streams, at the state and federal level, so we can tax a significant portion of that base to do the public good.  I’ll let the economists argue where we draw the line in the sand on levels and types of taxation.  But let’s put the public good at the head of the bus, not at the back of the bus.
    Lincoln was correct, government exists to do those things, which we alone can’t do for ourselves.  That includes funding good public schools, K-12 and great public universities; a good transportation system (from ports, to airports, to interstate highways to river systems) along with providing for the general welfare and the common defense.  
    But there is NO FREE LUNCH.  Taxes are the coin of the realm, they are the price of civilization.  The market did not explore the West – government did thanks to the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the largess of the Congress’s purse strings and the spirit of Lewis & Clark.  Those of us living in Oregon are their sons and daughters.  Let’s remember it was the public treasury which bank rolled westward progress – be it by explorers, wagon trains or railroads.
    We confiscated Indian lands and gave them away cheap to settlers; we granted railroads free land to build their ribbons of rail.  And while this was being done - the US Cavalry and federal marshalls established law and order in the Old West. 

IT'S OUR TURN!

By Russell Sadler
    Oregon public employees’ tenacity at holding on to the employment and retirement benefits they have negotiated, baffles conservatives, the Oregon Republican Parry and not a few businessmen. They do not seem to realize that public employees are well aware that private sector employers are trimming benefits and defined benefit pension plans in favor of individual 401-K plans, and don’t want the same thing to happen to them.
    The explanation for public employees’ tenacity is simple enough. Oregon public employees came late to the post-World War II prosperity party. The law that granted their collective bargaining rights wasn’t passed by the Legislature until 1973 -- well after private sector employees and the unions that represented them advanced industrial workers into the middle class.
    Public employees who designed, built, supervised and managed the infrastructure that underpins Oregon’s post-World War II growth, educated the “Baby Boomers” from kindergarten through graduate school and staffed all the daily functions of government began to retire in large numbers over the last decade. They are not about to give up what they believe they have earned over a professional lifetime just because some editorialists and politicians insist benefits and pensions are obsolete and the government-haters and budget-baiters say they are no longer willing to pay for them. Indeed, the louder Bill Sizemore, Don McIntire, Loren Parks and their ilk scapegoat public employees for the state’s fiscal situation, the more hard-nosed public employees become.
    To understand this attitude better is it necessary to go back to 1945 -- the year World War II ended -- and get a glimpse at what Oregon looked like at the end of the war.
    The industrial capacity of Europe and much of Asia and Japan was in ruins. Only the industrial capacity of North America remained largely intact, but devoted to war production, not consumer goods.
    Americans had been in serious deprivation since the agricultural recession in the mid-1920s that preceded the stock market crash of 1929 that ushered in The Great Depression. Widespread privation lingered for more than a decade after World War II ended unemployment, but wage and price controls limited individual prosperity and diverted resources to war production. Auto plants were making tanks and trucks instead of cars. World War II wage and price controls are the origin of the practice of employers paying for health care and pensions to compete for workers.
    After the war, American industry manufactured what was necessary to rebuild Europe, Japan and Asia. The unions that represented manufacturing employees made sure their members shared in the unprecedented prosperity, building a floor of wages and benefits that became taken for granted over the next 50 years.
    Oregon public employees where generally left out of this prosperity. Hobbled by laws that left labor relations a patchwork in the hands of local governments and prohibited strikes, public employees’ wages and benefits lagged well behind private sector compensation until 1973. Some cities, like Portland, had negotiated pensions with their police and firefighters. The Portland School District negotiated pensions with their teachers. Many local governments made no pension provisions and health benefits were spotty. Many public employees were so poorly paid, they qualified for food stamps, even welfare.
    Then - State Treasurer Bob Straub, a Democrat, took one look at those unfunded pensions -- property taxes were levied each year to pay retirees benefits for that year -- and promptly asked the Legislature to create a unified, fully-funded Public Employee Retirement System, which was regarded as something of a national model until it became an abused political football in the 1990s.
    Public employees were given collective bargaining rights in 1973. Not surprisingly, negotiated labor contracts eventually pulled public employees’ wages and benefits up to private sector standards over the last 35 years. Ironically, just as Oregon’s public employees were reaching a rough parity with private sector employees, private sector wages began to stagnate and benefits disappeared.
    Oregon private sector employers reflected national trends in exploiting part-time employment to avoid paying benefits, forcing employees to pay a larger share of health benefits (which is just a disguised wage cut). The Legislature has reacted much as the private sector has. Newer public employees are hired with lower wages and benefits although PERS remains, but with lower benefits.
    But as in the private sector -- auto manufacturing and airlines, for example -- it’s the retired and just retiring who demand what they were promised over their working lifetime that are the biggest cost.
    It is an important lesson in democracy. Public employees are demanding benefits promised by elected officials chosen to act in our name. We are morally obligated -- and the courts have repeatedly ruled, legally obligated -- to honor agreements made in our name.
    No amount of tantrums thrown by the budget-baiters and government-haters can renege on that obligation. Oregon’s public employees, latecomers to the prosperity party, are not about to surrender to that cruel adage, “Just as it gets to be your turn, they change all the rules.”
    RAD:  Having grown up in Roseburg in the '50s I can remember public school teacher friends talking in hushed tones about local school issues.  In those days, before collective bargaining rights existed for public employees any talk was considered akin to being a 'commie'.  Ironically enough, Roseburg teachers were the first to strike!  So despite the government haters out there from Grover Norquist to Bill Sizemore - you can't turn the clock back.  

EARLY RETURNS

Editor's Note:  Charlie Cook's latest Off To The Races for Tuesday, November 29, 2005 makes RAD warm in anticipation of the upcoming campaign season despite a winter of our discontent.  Here's a sample of the low hanging fruit. 

Capitol Hill Calculus
    "Lord knows that Republicans have plenty to worry about these days. President Bush now has the lowest approval ratings for an elected, second-term president in history -- the numbers are so low he is beginning to look more like a crippled than a lame duck."
    RAD:  Lower than Tricky Dick Nixon. Wow!  As the M's voice over Dave Neuhouse would say - "Slap on the rye bread, Momma, it's Grand salami time."  In Dubya's case perhaps paraphrasing Dizzie Dean is more to the point - "He slud into the hot corner and was out like a light!"  Keep Hope Alive... 
    "Then there are the generic congressional ballot test numbers that suggest at least a moderate, perhaps big, wave for Democrats. Add to that a depressing off-year election for Republicans, with the only major victor being a New York City mayor who is the very definition of a R-I-N-O (Republican In Name Only). Finally, toss in a scandal that has already implicated four GOP members, and some say could hit a dozen."
    RAD:  I thought being a 'compassionate conservative' was the in-thing to be these days for neo-cons. Of course compassion for whom is the key - the rich, the powerful, the well connected.  As the old jazz standard goes, "Them that has, and them that don't".  The GOP compassion goes to the former, clearly not the latter as we learned from Katrina. 
        "Another House member, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., resigned after a felony conspiracy and tax evasion conviction. And yet another member, Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., announced his retirement this past weekend, which is bad for the GOP because he represents a very competitive, moderate district, and the likelihood of the party nominating a very conservative candidate is high. The list of problems could go on."
    RAD:   How does the GOP recruit such dummies?  First, Tom Delay, then Bill Frist, then Scooter and now the Duke 'Top Gun' Cunningham.  Rove is waiting in the wings...  Scandalgate! 
    For more go to:  cook_column@emails.nationaljournal.com